Running a winery is a balancing act that never really stops. You’re managing seasonal demand, tasting room traffic, wine club fulfillment, compliance requirements, and a workforce that spans everything from harvest crews to hospitality staff. And you’re doing it with thinner margins than most people assume. The operational friction that eats into those margins usually lives in the same places: staff hunting for schedules, managers stuck at a desktop approving shift swaps, and new hires learning your systems on the fly.  The good news is that none of these require a major technology overhaul to address. This checklist identifies seven practical moves that can make a real difference in how your team operates, starting this week. Streamline People & Culture 1. Standardize your onboarding process. Every new hire should receive the same friction-free introduction to your operation. Instead of scrambling on their first day, ensure that system logins, tasting room protocols, and comp

It's July 1, which means you're about to start seeing "Christmas in July" everywhere. Retailers are already thinking about the holidays—even if it still feels like the middle of summer. Smart wineries should be doing the same. October, November, and December (OND) are your biggest sales months of the year. Holiday winery marketing doesn’t start in October—it starts now. They’re sprinting through Q3—right now—while everyone else is still daydreaming about hot cocoa and watching Christmas movies… you’ve got rosé in your glass and wine bundles to plan. Here's how to make the next 90 days count. 1. Clean Up Your Data — Because Bad Data Costs You Money This isn’t just about removing bounced emails. Bad data quietly drains OND revenue by blocking you from segmenting, targeting, or even reaching your customers. Your Move: Export your full email list (now, not later). Verify your SMS audience and make sure customer consent records are up to date. Use ChatGPT to help spot typos like gmaii.com

Outshinery has launched a free Visual scorecard, a self-serve assessment tool that lets beverage brand marketers, brand owners, and image managers see exactly where their visual library stands and what to fix first. The scorecard is live now at outshinery.com/visual-scorecard. The tool runs on six standards drawn from a decade of Outshinery client patterns: library completeness, visual consistency, channel readiness, production process maturity, image type diversity, and a qualitative read on the gaps a score alone cannot catch. Each one is a checkpoint that beverage brands of every size tend to underestimate, the same blind spots showing up again and again across briefs. Two paths are available. The full scorecard takes 20 minutes and walks through 23 questions across five scored sections plus one open prompt. A quick pulse takes 3 minutes and gives a directional read on the same six standards. Both end the same way: a maturity tier and the priorities to fix first. Tiers are named hon

The Shift in Drinking Habits Is Here Something structural has changed in how Americans relate to alcohol, and if you've been watching your DTC numbers, you've probably felt it before you could name it. Gallup's 2023 consumption survey found that the share of U.S. adults who drink has dropped to 62%, the lowest level since 1948. The IWSR has documented consecutive years of volume decline in still wine in the U.S. market. The casual, habitual wine buyer who grabs a familiar label on autopilot and treats wine as a grocery category is drinking less or shifting away entirely. Volume-driven marketing built around that consumer is chasing a contracting audience. That sounds threatening. It isn't, if you're willing to look at who is still buying. The consumer who remains is choosing quality over quantity, spending more per bottle precisely because they're buying fewer of them, and actively looking for brands worth their loyalty. The wineries that adapt their marketing to speak this language h

On Tuesday, June 4 at 10:00 am PST, Outshinery will host Score your shelf, a free 45-minute live session designed to help beverage brand marketers, brand owners, and image managers audit their visual library before the back half of the year. Hosted by Outshinery founder Laurie Millotte and Lauren Wallack, Owner and Creative Director of Solasta Studio, the live session will walk a real wine brand's visual library on camera against six standards: library completeness, visual consistency, channel readiness, production process maturity, image type diversity, and competitor comparison. Each attendee will leave with a maturity tier for their own setup, and a 90-day plan of action sized to where they actually are. "Most beverage brands run a visual audit once a year, the week before they need new images," said Millotte. "By then the gap has already cost them a sale, a channel, or a season. This session exists for the in-between months, when the gaps are still cheap to fix." The session will b

A few years ago at the DTC Wine Symposium, a panelist joked about the modern winery website formula: the guy, the dog, the truck, and the vineyard. Beautiful backdrop, strong lifestyle photography, a thoughtful founder story. Polished, absolutely. Strategically distinct, rarely. The critique wasn’t about branding. It was about structure. Most winery websites aren’t broken, but they aren’t built as decision environments either. Calls to action are unclear, revenue pathways are buried, shipping surprises appear late, and wine club often lives in isolation instead of throughout the buying journey. After auditing winery sites across regions and production sizes, the pattern is consistent: performance is constrained by friction, not effort. Most wineries don’t have a traffic problem. They have a conversion architecture problem. Before increasing ad spend or launching another promotion, run a winery website audit — on your phone. Start at the homepage and move t

The word “brand” is notoriously difficult to define in marketing. If we were talking about a ranch brand—the kind seared onto livestock to signify ownership—that’s easy to understand. But in marketing, a brand is not a physical thing. It’s a symbolic construct. It’s not the label on the bottle or the winery’s logo or even the product itself. Rather, it’s the entire perception a consumer holds in their mind about your company, your wine, your people, and everything you collectively represent. A brand is a conceptual identity that differentiates you from your competitors. It can be shaped by your name, your origin story, the design of your label, the personalities involved in your winery, your tasting room experience, your packaging, your email tone, your partnerships, or even how you respond to a customer complaint. All these elements come together to form the intangible yet powerful idea of your brand. It is, quite literally, eve

After 30 years of moving up and to the right, the American wine industry hit a wall. Not a temporary slowdown or a soft patch. A structural shift that requires a fundamentally different marketing playbook. 2025 was the reality check. 2026 is the year wineries either adapt or watch their customer base age out beneath them. The data is now unambiguous: wine sales dropped approximately 6% in 2024, marking the steepest decline in decades according to SipSource industry data. More troubling than the headline number is what's driving it. This isn't a recession blip or a bad vintage. It's a fundamental realignment of who drinks wine, how they buy it, and what they expect from the brands they choose. Here are the five trends reshaping the US wine market and what they mean for your brand's survival. The Demographic Disruption The wine industry built its growth on one generation: Baby Boomers. That generation is now aging out. The Wine Market Council's 2025 U.S. Consumer Ben

By Leeann Froese, Town Hall Brands Over the past few months, wineries across North America have begun receiving a vague but unsettling notification from Facebook stating that their Page is “not being suggested to other people at the moment.” In many cases, there are no visible violations, no content removals, and no clear explanation. Pages remain live. Accounts remain in good standing. But organic discovery has narrowed. This is not a glitch, and it is not necessarily a punishment. It is a platform decision, and it has real implications for how wineries should approach marketing in 2026. This is not a compliance failure Most wineries encountering this issue are fully compliant with Facebook’s Community Standards. Their content is allowed to exist on the platform. What has changed is recommendation and amplification, which Facebook controls separately under its Terms of Service. In other words, a Page can follow every rule and still be excluded from algorithmic d

If your winery’s December felt like a sugar high followed by a January hangover, congratulations—you’re in the club. The holiday season brings out the best and worst of wine marketing. We see a flurry of emails, social posts, pop-up bundles, and panicked “last chance for shipping!” reminders that make even Santa unsubscribe. But behind all that glitter and noise sits something actually useful: data. And data, unlike mistletoe or tinsel, ages beautifully—if you know how to use it. Day 1: The Ghost of Open Rates Past Let’s start with the easy one. You sent fifteen emails between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and shocker—open rates dropped after the first week. This isn’t your subscribers turning into Grinches; it’s list fatigue. Consumers are bombarded with messages from every brand they’ve ever accidentally clicked “subscribe” on. The fix: cut your frequency, not your revenue. Segment your list by engage