Kool Vino Bag
These days, companies that are marketing to a younger crowd often employ something called “street teams.” These teams are made up of groups of young people in the company’s target demographic that are paid to take a product out on the streets or any place where their customers are, and show it, use it, and talk about it to others in an attempt to stir up interest and sales.
Wineries can take advantage of this same tactic to help promote their brands to potential new customers. It’s as simple as effectively offering branded merchandise to visitors in tasting rooms.
“Once the wine is drunk and the bottle recycled, your customers could easily forget you,” said Vanessa Topper of TopNest Designs in Northern California. “If they take home a decanter or corkscrew with your winery’s name on it, chances are they’ll remember you.”
Most tasting rooms today sell merchandise along with Read More→
7 Ways to Grow your Facebook Fans
By · CommentsGuest Blogger: Winery Advisor
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More Fans – More Interactions – More Sales
Why do we want more fans?
Every time a fan comments, “likes” or interacts with your fan page there is a good chance it will be broadcasted to the News Feed of all of their Facebook Friends. Lots of interactions will signal to Facebook that this is important information and it will be included on a fan’s News Feed. Each fan can have hundreds or even thousands of Friends. If only 10 of your fans interact with an event notice, photo, video or simple text type message, that information can show up on thousands of peoples Facebook News Feeds — and can be furthered shared with multiple levels of additional friends. This is how your information, special offer or call to action, can go “viral” spreading quickly to many people.
Seven Ways to Grow Your Facebook Fans
- Have multiple influential users invite all of their friends to become fans of the page. If you can get 20 people each to invite 100 users, and encourage these users to invite their own friends, your fans will quickly grow. Use incentives if necessary – contests, rewards for joining, etc.
- Leverage your other online resources including email lists, websites, blogs and any other place you have a digital presence. Start to call them to action to join your fan page. Add Facebook links to the homepage of your websites, add a link in employee emails, place links in your email and newsletter marketing. The key is to funnel enough subscribers to the page where a natural cycle of growth begins by virtue of more people becoming fans.
- Leverage your “offline” media. Include promotions and Read More→
LaBelle Winery in New Hampshire - www.labellewinerynh.com
If you have been thinking about building a new winery or expanding your existing one, there is a lot to consider before starting. It entails more than simply finding available space and putting up a building. In the world of winery construction the difference between a happy, successful conclusion to a construction project and one that turns into a money pit nightmare is pre-planning.
“Before you do anything, find your use permit either in your files or at the county records department,” said Demerus Lescure, vice president at Lescure Engineers, Inc., a civil engineering firm in Santa Rosa, California. “With an existing winery there is a description of what the county will let you do in terms of how many cases of wine you can produce, or whether or not you can have winery events. You may need to apply for a modification if your existing permit doesn’t match up with your new plans and sometimes, previous restrictions have gone away.”
It’s common, especially for rural wineries that don’t have as much public interaction, to run into trouble with use permits. As Lescure has observed, these winery owners often think nobody’s watching, so they just go ahead and add a new out building, or a new fermentation facility to enlarge their capacity. It’s all good until the neighbors start noticing more truck traffic and turn them in. It happens.
“It’s easy to say let’s add a room, or more barrels, or a new crush pad,” said Lescure. “But pretty soon the neighbors are Read More→
Advisor: Why Using a Recruiter Makes Sense
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Why Using a Recruiter Makes Sense
Your top financial officer just quit and left you with a gaping hole in the management team. Your winemaker just told you she’s moving to New Zealand at the end of the month. You had to let your sales manager go because he can’t get along with the rest of the staff.
What do you do now?
In the past, many winery owners just sat down, wrote up a want ad and put it in the newspaper or on Craig’s List hoping the right person would see it and respond. This typically resulted in dozens of phone calls getting in the way of normal business, and dozens of resumes flooding the fax machine. Somebody then had to stop whatever it is they normally do in order to sort through all the applicants and try to choose which ones to call back for an interview. Then somebody had to schedule and conduct the interviews, a process that could take weeks.
In the meantime, all the work that would normally be getting done is piling up because of the distractions of the hiring process, including the work of the unfilled position.
Today, instead of do-it-yourself hiring, many savvy winery owners are utilizing the expertise of Read More→
There are people in the Wine Industry that don’t own vineyards or make wine, yet their impact on our business is indisputable. They are the people behind our winery associations, our media and our trade and they’re making a difference. “People” was created to acknowledge their role and celebrate their successes.
Writer: Jim Brumm
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Vintank’s Chief Strategy Officer Paul Mabray grew up in the heart of Napa Valley wine country. His mother was an assistant pathologist, and his father was an electronic engineer who would bring computers home and teach his eight-year-old son to program them. “That’s where I got my geek,” said Paul, “from my dad.”
Paul Mabray - Vintank Chief Strategy Officer
As a boy Paul wanted to write and direct movies. After high school he studied film and English at San Francisco State University. During college, at just 23-years old, Paul became vice president of Napa Ale Works, helping with marketing. Paul laughed as he said, “They’d never seen a college kid doing percentage costs on a spreadsheet.”
Later, Paul found work at Niebaum Coppola Winery where he “tried to marry his acumen with his sales skills.” It was there, he said, that he found his passion for what he called “the insanity that is the wine business.”
Later, Paul went into business development with wineshopper.com, which merged with wine.com. “I quickly found that not only did I speak wine, I spoke geek. I loved the challenge of working in a system that was completely broken,” he said. “The wine industry was challenged because they were unable to ‘touch’ their customers every day. This was true with the wineries, the retailers and the distributors. I thought I could solve that problem.”
Paul took a leap of faith and founded Inertia Beverage Group (IBG) in 2002. Surviving on Top Ramon, he worked diligently and managed through verve, passion, drive, and a great product, to attract the attention of investors. Eventually, he was able to raise 15.6 million dollars, and Inertia Beverage Group became the first successful ecommerce platform for the wine industry. For the first time a company had bridged the gap between wineries and Read More→
There are people in the Wine Industry that don’t own vineyards or make wine, yet their impact on our business is indisputable. They are the people behind our winery associations, our media and our trade and they’re making a difference. “People” was created to acknowledge their role and celebrate their successes.
Writer: Jim Brumm
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Steve Burns is a man who loves what he does for a living. What he does is promote wine and wine regions, perhaps better than anyone. As co-owner of O’Donnell Lane, LLC, in Sonoma, California, Burns has his hands just where he wants them—on the leading edge of the wine industry.
Steve Burns
Burns was born in Germany, the son of an army colonel, and lived all over the world as he grew up. Though his father had hopes of him following in his footsteps, Burns hoped to become a veterinarian. He joined 4-H as a boy and studied animal science at Cal Poly in San Louis Obispo. In college he “realized I wanted to get out and do more.” He switched his major and graduated with a BA in business management.
Laughing, he told me, “My first job was selling bull semen for the Angus Association!” Traveling around the Pacific Northwest, this was the genesis of a long career working with trade associations.
“I learned a lot of lessons doing that job,” he said, “both in working for myself and understanding membership-driven trade associations and how they work.” The Angus Association sent him to Sacramento, California, where through a friend’s contacts he was offered a job on the staff of California’s then governor George Deukmejian.
“I didn’t agree with him on many things, but I liked him,” said Burns. In his work with the governor he learned the ins and outs of politics, a subject he loves. He learned how to organize and how to present issues to people. He learned about bringing large groups of people to consensus, a skill that would serve him well in the future.
After working in politics, Burns was offered two jobs: one with the Prune Board, and one with the Wine Institute of California. He joked as he spoke of this crossroad in his career. “Hmm… I could go with the prunes, or I could go with wine… let me see…”
He took the job with the Wine Institute and never looked back. For eight years he served as their international marketing manager, learning the fine details of doing business overseas, and dealing with cross-cultural sales and marketing. His experience in working with associations helped greatly with his success there.
Later the Washington State Wine Commission recruited Burns to help them build Read More→
Writers: Dr. Janeen Olsen and Dr. Liz Thach, MW, SSU Wine Business Institute
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Is a new press, a wine label design change, or a purchase of fifty new French barrels in your future? If so, how do you and other winery executives determine which supplier to use in order to achieve the highest quality product or service at a cost-effective price?
Positive supplier relationships have always been important in the wine industry, but even more so during tough economic times. With increased global competition and pressure to reduce costs, wineries often scrutinize suppliers more closely to obtain better pricing. At the same time, long-standing relationships are also a primary consideration. So what factors really drive a winery’s decision in supplier selection?
Some of the answers can be found in the results of a new study completed by the Wine Business Institute at Sonoma State University. An online survey was sent to wineries across the US, and the 117 respondents shed some light on factors impacting winery supplier choice.
About the Responding Wineries
Respondents to the survey were primarily winery owners, winemakers, and purchasing managers. The average number of years in business for all wineries was around 15, with a larger percentage (60%) of wineries located in California. Size of winery based on case production included 74% at less than 10,000 cases, 15% between 10,000 and 50,000 cases and 11% producing more than 50,000 cases.
Methods Wineries Use to Find A Good Supplier?
Survey results show that wineries use a variety of methods to identify and research potential suppliers. Figure 1 illustrates that word of mouth is seen as very important or extremely important by (67%), followed by the Internet (44%), trade shows (26%), industry organizations (15%), print publications (9%), and finally social media (5%). The greatest change over previous years appear to be a greater emphasis on the Internet and soc ial media as research tools, and slightly less emphasis on print media and trade shows.
Figure 1: How Wineries Identify Suppliers
What Are the Most Important Factors in Selecting a Supplier?
While pricing is a driver for evaluating new suppliers, it isn’t seen as the only critical factor in the purchase decision. Indeed, as illustrated in Figure 2, high quality Read More→
People: Robert Merletti
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There are people in the Wine Industry that don’t own vineyards or make wine, yet their impact on our business is indisputable. They are the people behind our winery associations, our media and our trade and they’re making a difference. “People” was created to acknowledge their role and celebrate their successes.
Writer: Jim Brumm
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Vineyard and Winery Management Magazine publisher Robert Merletti brings experience, knowledge, and integrity to the industry he loves.
Robert Merletti, CEO and publisher of Vineyard and Winery Management Magazine, is arguably one of the most influential people in the wine industry today.
Merletti grew up in the wine producing Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. His stepfather, Bill Moffett, was a grape grower who started the publication (under a different name) in 1974 to help highlight the region and bring information and news about grape growing and the wine industry to others in the business.
After high school Merletti attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, earning a degree in business management. He wanted to join the family publishing business but he was initially discouraged by his parents. “They told me to get a real job,” he said, laughing.
For a while he entertained the idea of going to law school, but ended up working as a broker on Wall Street, and later in the banking industry. Eventually his parents did offer him a job with the magazine and in 1995 he packed up his belongings and moved to Sonoma County, California to begin “two years of isolation,” working alone in a small office selling ads and growing the business. As time went by he was able to hire an assistant and move into larger offices. He became the magazine’s sales manager and eventually purchased the business from his folks.
Under his leadership the business thrived and expanded. Today Vineyard and Winery Management occupies 4300 square feet of office space in Santa Rosa, CA and has a staff of 15. It has become the leading wine trade magazine in Read More→
Writer: Jim Brumm
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“Would you pay a few hundred bucks an acre for a spray that would guarantee you seventy-five percent of your grape production every year?”
So asks Michael Applegate of St. Helena Insurance Associates, in Napa Valley, California. Unfortunately there is no such spray, but he reminds us that good crop insurance can do the same thing, and that the deadline for purchasing insurance for next year’s crop—January 31, 2012—is fast approaching. Crop insurance is potentially the best investment a grower can make.
Crop insurance offers protection from losses caused by natural events, such as frost, drought, wind, rain, hail—pretty much anything Mother Nature throws our way that can damage grapes on the vine. In addition, damage to irrigation systems can be covered if caused by acts of nature.
Grape growers, like all farmers, face many perils each year, and these perils vary depending on location and climate. “In Napa Valley, for example, there are lots of different micro-climates,” said Chris Maloney, owner of Chris Maloney Crop insurance, LLC, in Petaluma, California. “There are different vineyards at different elevations; they all have different risk exposures.”
Maloney pointed out that there were losses from adverse weather conditions in Read More→
There are people in the Wine Industry that don’t own vineyards or make wine, yet their impact on our business is indisputable. They are the people behind our winery associations, our media and our trade and they’re making a difference. “People” was created to acknowledge their role and celebrate their successes.
Writer: Jim Brumm
Printable PDF Version
A woman sits across from me at a local coffee shop in Santa Rosa, California. She is animated and upbeat. As usual, she is talking about wine, and as usual, her story ends with a laugh and I can’t help laughing along.
“I think people take wine way too seriously,” she is saying. “I think that wine should be fun.” She goes on to tell a story of filling her bathtub with red wine and bathing in it. I form a mental picture of this . . .
Meet Sue Straight, AKA the Wine Wench®. Sue is not your typical wine reviewer/writer/taster. Sue is not your typical person.
Born in Santa Monica, California, Sue grew up in the San Fernando Valley (and she does a mean “valley girl” imitation). Living on a small ranch with her family, she said she was “riding before I was born.” As a girl she wanted to be a horse veterinarian when she grew up, but that was not to be.
“I’m a failed Jewish American Princess,” she said, laughing. “I was always too bohemian to fit into that world.”
After high school she worked for a while at a veterinarian hospital in southern California and met and married a man who was both a farrier and a musician. Sue trained horses during the day and waitressed at night. She would roller skate down Ventura Boulevard to work each day. (At one point she was offered a chance to try out for the Los Angeles Thunderbirds roller derby team, but that’s another story.)
In 1981 Sue moved to Healdsburg, in northern California’s Sonoma County. One evening, while working as a waitress, a regular customer who managed a nearby tasting room offered Sue a job at her winery. “I thought, okay . . . I like wine,” said Sue, with a smile. She accepted the Read More→
