For background, the wine industry foresees big trouble ahead. The generation that fueled the wine boom of the last few decades is aging out, and the younger ones don't seem as interested in wine.
One winery may have found a way to grab onto the future.
 |
| Director of Winemaking at Wente Vineyards |
Wente Vineyards has been around forever, by California standards. They have a history with chardonnay in California, as most of it comes from the Wente clone that originated in Burgundy. In the past they spent time on social media and with visitors talking about chardonnay clones. The people that occasionally drank Wente in the 1970s kept them going through many decades with this kind of self-promotion.
How have they changed? They have young women in key positions. These are people that look like the crowd they wanted to attract, so they pushed this on social media. "This is who we are and we are just like you", meaning potential consumers in the 20s and 30s.
Wente has a line of wines in the $20s and $30s, and quite a few wines over $50 that are probably now being purchased by the older visitors with the disposable income, plus the nearby Bay Area has quite a few younger techies making good money.
Other data seems to show wine consumers in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are buying wine via direct-to-consumer meaning in the tasting room or with online orders from wineries. They aren't necessarily buying as high-priced wine as some might hope -- a function of stagnant salaries along with high housing costs.
What Wente successfully did is not something every winery can do, but maybe at least learn something from it. That is, spending more time on who you are as it relates to potential new customers and have some wines they can afford. This previous sentence reads, "If you are spending time marketing to 20-somethings while selling $65 Pinot Noir, you might be wasting your time." That should be obvious, but I don't think it is to everyone.
Article on Wente's turnaround from the North Bay Business Journal
No comments:
Post a Comment