The Most Useless Winery Web Site?

I have a Google Alert for the phrase winery web site, and it turns up things like this post, which includes the following comment:

Bonus points: this is probably the most useless winery Web site I've ever seen. Check it out!

The Web site in question?  Daniel Le Brun, "one of New Zealand's most respected Methode Traditionnelle wines."

Is it the most useless winery Web site you've ever seen?  Well, it does have a phone number and an e-mail link.  And a nice picture of their looks-like-everybody-else's-bottle sparkling wine.  But...

• It doesn't tell people who want to buy the wine where they can find it, other than "most wine 
  retailers, supermarkets and a selection of restaurants throughout New Zealand."  It would be nice to have a little more detail.
• It doesn't offer the opportunity to buy their wine online.  What, they don't like more margin?  Do the Kiwis place some restriction on online wine sales?
• It doesn't have full contact information.
• It doesn't have anything for the media who might be interested in writing or blogging about Daniel Le Brun sparklers. 
• It doesn't have any consumer-oriented information about the wines they sell.

This winery presumably sells a lot of wine, and the focus of their site is on the trade ("call us if you'd like to sell our wine").  For the trade, it's OK (but they're missing an opportunity to support their distributors, retailers, and restaurants with sales materials).  For everyone else, it *is* pretty useless.

Remember: there are four types of visitor arriving at your winery Web site:

1. People who want to buy your wine right now (buyers)
2. People who want more information about your wine or winery (browsers)
3. People who want to sell your wine (the trade)
4. People who want to tell a story about your wines or winery (the media)

If you were Daniel Le Brun wines, what would you do?

Comments

[ryan]

This is by FAR the least useful wine site! I have seen way too many with NO email, NO phone, NO contact form, NO info on the wines they sell. In fact if your going to do as little as possible, then this is a good place to start at least. In the end I can find a way to contact you! :)

[rick]

Meh. You don't need to go to NZ to find sites like that. Look at Turley's:

http://www.turleywinecellars.com/

A little more detail and nicer looking, but it's basically the same thing. And you know what? That's fine perhaps.

WHAT?!?!?

That's right, it might be fine. If a winery is selling out right and left and has a waiting list... what does a website do for them? Sure you can put up some minimal information about where you are, a contact method and whether you do tastings... but let's say you don't do tastings, you're selling out so fast it's silly and you aren't all that interesting in just putting up information about the vineyards etc. What's the business reason to spend a serious amount of time and effort to create a web site?

I have my own ideas, being a marketing and web person... but from the standpoint of a winery owner, you need to justify that effort and expense. And in some cases, you simply don't need a site that does much more than either of those two sites.

[Andrew Kamphuis]

I've been around the block on this, but would it be better to have a useless site or no site? A useless website can bring your entire brand down.

I do agree with Rick a bit. A site does need effort and time, and if you don't have the time, and the effort - then why? A website can take a serious time commitment but it doesn't have to if you don't have the time. (For example you don't have to have a blog. You can get by with just refreshing lots of your 'About Us' type pages just once a year.). How much information do you have to keep up to date regularly and how hard is it?

I would argue that for most wineries a website can save a lot of time and money. A customer can order online instead of phoning in the order. A customer can learn about new event etc through an email blast rather than the winery trying to contact people through advertising.

[rick]

Andrew,

Good point about the brand impact. And I do feel a minimal website with some of the features you've outlined is worth it and easy to do. But that wasn't the criticism leveled by Mike at this site. It was that it was 'useless' i.e. that it didn't hit all of the features that most people feel sites should have. My reply to that is simply that if a winery is easily selling out, they don't need all of those features since they can't sell more than they have in stock.

Branding is important, but wine is an odd business unlike making most things in that you can only make as much wine as you have grapes and you only get to make it once a year. So, unless you're looking to create a K-J, becoming a mass market brand doesn't matter. You only care about that small subset of people who can and will buy your wines.

[Frank Haddad]

The most useless has to be Gajas

[Ron McFarland]

For what it is worth Daniel Le Brun has not been associated with this label for many yeas and might be one of the reasons for the poor web site.

We are one of two USA importers that have Daniel Le Brun's sparkling wines available in the USA. They are now under the label No 1 Family Estate.

Ron McFarland
www.NewZealandFoodWines.com