finalanalysis

In case you haven’t had enough bad news lately, tourism (which includes convention business) is down 16% in Atlanta.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the economy sucks. This has an impact on all consumer goods, but especially luxury items. Wine, unfortunately, is a luxury item. Americans don’t have the same cultural relationship to wine that Europeans do, and as such find it east to cut wine either back or our of their budget. Wineries realize this, and want to do what they can to preserve their sales.

Enter the market visit!

Wineries seem to think that if they send someone into a city to sell wine, they will magically sell all the backstock they’ve been sitting on. While it is true that having a winery work the market does help sell the wine, it isn’t a magic bullet:

• For starters, all the other wineries are thinking the same thing and are planning trips too.
• Commercial wine buyers are feeling the same pressures the wineries are and are either handling multiple sets of responsibilities, trying to streamline their procurement, trying to streamline their inventories, or all three.
• The reason many wineries sales have slipped is because they have priced themselves above what the market will support. They aren’t being greedy, per se. Land costs money, labor costs money and brand new oak barrels cost money. All these things contribute to the cost of a wine, but that doesn’t mean people will pay that cost.

Occasionally, a winery owner or winemaker will visit the market. They bring with them such passion and enthusiasm that it is infectious and rubs off on the customer. Just as often, they are haggled, tense, and have the smell of desperation about them, and that rubs off on the customer too.

For a salesperson, the blade is double-edged. If you get the passionate person on a market visit, you can catch lighting in a bottle and sell more wine than you could have hoped. If you get the desperate one, at best you will be distracted from your regular duties because you are playing tour guide and chauffeur and you will sell less wine than you would have otherwise.

Wineries who overdeliver quality for their price vintage after vintage will always have a market. They may be premium priced, but they will get that price. Wineries with no real track record who are charging $60/btl because their neighbor does may soon find that what seemed reasonable 5 years ago seems extravagant now.

Almost two months have passed since I last posted. This is pretty embarrassing. For those of you who have continued to check in on this blog only to see that, yet again, I have posted nothing, thanks for coming back.