Lazy Sunday: That Internet Thing

It made me really happy to read the conclusions to Steve Heimoff's latest post, especially this one:

Figure out alternatives to the three-tiered system and how to market and sell direct, and not just through the old tasting room, but through the Internet. You may not understand cyberspace, but your kids or grandkids do.

I've always been a little disappointed that the customized Winery Web Site Report (which was the genesis of this blog) never got traction, but it became quite clear that an effective Web presence was not a point-of-pain for most wineries.

Maybe that's about to change.  Regardless, take five minutes with your Sunday morning hot beverage and read Mr. Heimoff's lucid post on the wine industry's unpalatable truths.

Comments

[Dr. Horowitz]

Keep up the blog posts!

If sales are still slow after Summer '09 wineries are going to be forced to start spending? investing? in their Web presence.

[Steve Heimoff]

Dr. H. makes a good point. Wineries will realize that a web presence is an effective, and inexpensive, way to get their brand out there. The question will be, where on the Web should they be, with literally thousands of choices.

[Mike Duffy]

Steve:
I expected wineries to really get into the Web thing after the Supreme Court decision in 2005, but I'm not sure that's been the case (despite a 10x increase in the number of winery blogs, for example). That expectation led me to develop The Winery Web Site Report, a 25-element custom printed evaluation of a winery Web site, along with the results for over 2,800 other wineries, segmented by case production, and online access to data for $495. It seemed that small wineries would benefit from the evaluation, large ones from the data (which cost a fair amount to collect and update).

Sold a pathetic number of them, lost money on the project.

So now I blog, which is cheaper. :)

Cultivate, eWinery, and Inertia all have a business interest in helping smaller wineries succeed online, but all take a percentage of sales. While their customer base has grown, it hasn't been an easy sell for them (as far as I know). The soup-to-nuts approach (integration with POS and tasting room, compliance, fulfillment, web presence, etc.) is probably the right approach.

Dr. Horowitz:
Thank you for the encouragement!

Here's a California wine industry documentary:
http://www.astateofvine.com/