Are you Part of the Problem? The Wine INdustry Has Created a Climate Where It Can’t Win While Craft Beer is Crushing It!

July 6th. We’re halfway through 2013 and what has changed? What have we learned?

Not terribly much most likely. One thing I have learned is that when someone writes that someone else has “Nailed It!” we’re probably wasting time talking about the same old crap. 

The validity of the 100 point scale.

The effectiveness of social media.

Or even better: How to measure ROI on social media.

These all come with the territory of course, but I wish that they didn’t. Our business, this crazy business of moving bottles, is of course a joy, and a curse. We operate like no other business on earth. Preying as much on ego as on the joy wine contributes to our lives, throwing around the ever less meaningful 20 point grading scale that poses as 100 points as though the novice can derive useful info from the numbers in abstract, and pretending that we know all of these wines that it is impossible for one person to know.

What can we make of it all? It’s a tough question that I find easy to ask, and yet impossibly difficult to answer. What we should do is perhaps not try to answer, but simply try to make everyone’s life a bit easier by not celebrating what divides us, but rather what unites us. And that is of course wine, a passion for wine, and the desire to educate. An educated consumer is your best customer afterall!

We have these disparate days, you know them #CabernetDay, #GrenacheDay, why is there no #ArintoDay by the way? They are supposed to help market wines, and you should be the beneficiary of some of that marketing largesse, but are you? I would guess not. Not because the idea is bad, but rather because it is poorly executed. It is, as is so much of what transpires in the wine world, designed for the in-crowd. What we all need is more of the out-crowd to become interested in wine. I don’t know how to do that but I would love your suggestions. I would also love to hear from you and your ideas on better coordinating the events we do have at hand to help to drive awareness and of course sales through you stores. How can we work together?

This is where that “Nailed It” nonsense comes in. Entirely too much back patting going on in our industry and not enough hand holding. The craft beer movement is exploding, and displacing some interest in wine I might add. In the end this might be a good thing for all involved since appreciation of craft beer builds all the assets one needs to branch out into wine, but I am left wondering what they are doing right that we’re doing wrong.

Wine remains a product with a snobbish and intimidating aura and we have to change that, or at least make the effort to try and change it. That comes from doing something, and doing it differently than we have been doing. We need to be more collaborative and we need to leverage our relationships outside of the wine industry to get the word out. Wine is fabulous, it need not be expensive, and it certainly doesn’t need to snobby.

I would love to create a network of retailers, Snooth Approved or what have you. Retailers that we can all feel comfortable sending friends and family to. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that idea, and any others you would like to see implemented to help grow all of our businesses. I know you aren’t thrilled about working together and often don’t see the benefit of larger campaigns that might also help your competition, but as I said, it’s time we do things differently!

So are you going to be part of the problem, or part of the solution? Let’s solve this together!