The Winery Web Site Report

Who Buys Wine?

Here's a nugget from Hugh McLeod's summary notes on his involvement with Stormhoek over the past two years.

10. One thing that the Tesco road trip nailed for me: Most wine is bought by ordinary folk. Most of them are women. Most choose the wine because they like the label. Most won't spend more than $10. And that, my friends, is the market I am in. Sure, the male-dominated, over-fifty-dollar "snob" market might be a good wee business to be in for some folk, but be warned: it's a surprisingly tiny niche.

He's got more to say here, including that Stormhoek sold 40,000 cases of wine in 2005, and their current run rate is close to half a million cases a year.

It also points out why artisan (i.e. small, high-priced) producers need a direct-to-consumer strategy.  Because the person in Safeway isn't buying your wine.

Lazy Sunday: Netflix for Wine

Check it out: WineQ - basically a choose-it-yourself wine club, clearly modelled after the very successful Netflix DVD rental service.  From the How It Works page:

All the wines you see on our site are hand-crafted and sold by small, family-owned wineries in California, typically producing less — sometimes much less — than 10,000 cases a year.

Certainly another way to introduce people to your wine.  But ideally, you'd get them to sign up for *your* wine club, where the margins are better.  As with RadCru or wine.woot, the goal is one-to-one access to someone who has sampled your wine.

Interesting note: WineQ will pay you $10 to get someone to sign up.  In other words, they have an affiliate program.

Wineries in the audience:  what do you think about WineQ?

Lenn Rants About Winery Web Sites

Lenn Thompson of Lenndevours asks the question, "Why do some restaurants and wineries even have Web sites?"

I know. I know. Many wineries and websites are short staffed and they just don't have the time or manpower to keep up with their websites. That's the easy excuse.

Fact is, people in my generation and younger use the Internet to plan trips to wine country, to buy wine, and to get their information.

Maybe these wineries and restaurants should stop spending thousands of dollars a year advertising in many of the marginal print publications locally and use a little bit of that money on their websites. My guess is that their return on investment would increase quickly

I sort-of agree with Lenn's last paragraph.  Print advertising is easier than keeping a Web site up-to-date.  But a winery Web site is just part of a well-conceived overall marketing plan.  Done correctly, a Web site works for your winery hard 24/7.  Done wrong , it does nothing, or worse (as Lenn pointedly observes), it damages your reputation.

The abundant comments on Lenn's post show that it strikes a nerve.  I couldn't help but add my two cents:

...Probably the number one problem we observed with winery Web sites was "freshness" - they simply aren't kept up to date. There are two keys to success: a site which is easy to update (i.e. designed to be updated without costing a fortune), and a plan for regular updates...

Tracy Hall from Selene Wines had an excellent longer comment from a winery's point-of-view, saying, in part:

In my opinion, the problem isn't the wineries, it's the lack of website companies/people who are willing to MAINTAIN a website on a monthly basis, rather than just sitting back waiting for the customer to call them to 'redo' their site. It's not an excuse, it's just the reason.

What do you think?  Realistically, what should consumers expect from winery Web sites?

The World's Worst Wine Writer?

This post on bad wine writing from Bob Bly (a pretty well-know direct marketer and copywriter), entitled The World's Worst Wine Writer?, is interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, it highlights a poor wine review from a very popular publication, USA Today.  If you wonder why "average folks" have a bad impression of wine culture, this is certainly a contributing example.  To be fair to the writer, Jerry Shriver, it appears that he doesn't usually write this way, and his blog does link to great examples of wine writing like Dr. Vino and Vinography (both American Wine Blog Award winners).

Second, the comments to Bly's post illustrate how a cross-section of people in and outside the wine drinking public feel about wine and wine writing.  It's a small sample, but it does serve as a reminder that not everyone sees the world as we do.

All wine reviews are a substitute for actually tasting a wine.  The best wine reviews help us to understand whether we would enjoy the wine, and get us interested in finding out.  And that means taking the audience, be it wine lovers or McPaper readers, into account.

And the same applies to the writing you do on your winery Web site.

Personal example?  I bought a case of Dover Canyon Old Vine Zinfandel, Benito Dusi Vineyard solely on the strength of Mary Baker's writing (who was nominated for an American Wine Blog Award).

Lazy Sunday: Too Big A Niche

When I started working on The Winery Web Site Report in 2005 (the customized publication, not this blog), I thought that wineries would be an interesting niche.  Surely, with the then-soon-to-come Supreme Court decision on direct shipment, wineries all across the US would be focussing more attention on their Web sites.  With 3,000 or more domestic wineries, surely that was a good-sized niche to work in.

Now it occurs to me that I picked a niche that was too big.  Instead, I should have focused just on Sonoma County wineries (or Napa County wineries or another state with a lot of wineries like Oregon or Washington).

Of course, what I should also have done is called each one of the wineries in that smaller niche to gauge their true interest in spending money on an evaluation of their Web site vs. those around them.