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.
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
Napa built its reputation not only on fine wine but on hospitality, and wine regions around the world have followed in its footsteps. Without a strong historical wine culture in the United States, the fledgling wine industry needed a way to get in front of consumers and educate them. So wineries opened their cellar doors and started popping corks to share the sensibility of good food and good wine, and encourage people to bring the magic home. Over time, those wine regions be
.png)
.png)
