Thoughts on wine, marketing, and the business of both — from a self-professed wine nerd in Napa.
Every good cellar keeps notes. This is mine — a running record of what I'm tasting, thinking, and observing across the worlds of wine and wine marketing. New posts drop on Substack; they live here, too.
How I discovered my passion for Wine Everyone who has worked in wine has been asked the same question at one point in time: What was your ah-ha bottle? Some industry professionals have a great story about a bottle that strikes like lightning. I do not. Not that I haven’t had spectacular wines that linger in my memory. There was a glass of Madeira from 1880 served at the end of a beautiful Michelin-Starred meal at Meadowood. A bottle of Pomerol from 1986 that finally made the
And the data behind it A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what the wine industry gets wrong about hospitality, and one of the things I mentioned was the gap between marketing and hospitality. Commerce 7 (a leading wine industry software provider) recently released a report analyzing their direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales data. And that report backs up everything I said. Fifty-five percent of DTC transactions occur at the point-of-sale, AKA the tasting room. These transactions
What NOT to do with email I’ve worked in email for most of my professional career — in fact, I’ve twice run email programs for daily offer businesses. And I find the puzzle that is a successful email program fascinating. Who should get it, when do they want it, what message, where does it fit in the broader outreach picture… I recently attended a wine auction, and I’ve started receiving follow-up emails from some of the participating wineries. There were a couple of glaring i
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The cellar goes deeper than you think
More on wine, marketing, and the business of both — waiting for you on Substack.
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