The Wine Atlas Collective: Like a Passport for Your Member Benefits

Earlier this summer, we announced a new collaboration with seven other wineries around the United States. It's called the Wine Atlas Collective.

The collective is the brain child of Janie Heuck, Managing Director of Brooks Winery in Oregon's Willamette Valley. I've long admired Brooks for their community-minded approach, their outstanding farming, and their lovely wines. And Janie is one of the deepest thinkers I know in the world of wine about what makes a business great. So when she reached out to me wanting to talk about a new idea, I was primed to think it a good one. And it really is.

The Basics
The idea behind the Wine Atlas Collective is to share club member benefits between a group of independently-run, sustainably-minded wineries. If you're a member at one winery and go to visit another winery in the Collective, you'll be treated as a member there. That typically means no (or reduced) tasting fee, access to special wines, and discounts on purchases. It's a sort of a built-in referral network, and a starting point for when you're in a new wine region.

A key part of the concept is that the network of wineries reflects the diversity of American wine. We were not trying to re-create the referral networks within the regions in which we're based. We felt like most of us already had good relationships with our neighbors and had done what we could to ensure that when customers were visiting our region we were providing (and receiving) good referrals. Instead, we wanted to reach beyond our existing communities. We decided to limit ourselves to one winery per region, and stretch the regions beyond just the typical West Coast mainstays of California, Washington, and Oregon. After some brainstorming, some outreach, and some discussions, we settled on the following eight founding wineries, representing six states:

• Blenheim Vineyards – Virginia (Charlottesville)
• Brooks – Oregon (Willamette Valley)
• Frog’s Leap – California (Napa Valley)
• L’Ecole № 41 – Washington (Walla Walla Valley)
• Red Tail Ridge – New York (Finger Lakes)
• Ridge Vineyards – California (Sonoma & Santa Cruz Mountains)
• William Chris Vineyards – Texas (Hill Country)
• Tablas Creek Vineyard – California (Paso Robles)

Why I Love the Idea
Wine is not a zero sum product. Very few wine lovers buy from just one winery. So helping another winery do better doesn't make a customer less likely to buy from us. In fact, I've always thought that if someone buys wine from one of our neighbors, or someone who grows the same grapes we do, or someone who farms regeneratively, that makes them more likely to buy from Tablas Creek, not less. That's a big part of the reason why we spend so much time helping organizations like the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, or Rhone Rangers, or the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation. If other wineries in the categories we share succeed, so will we.

The Wine Atlas Collective takes this same idea one step further and gives us the chance to build a new community of wineries in different regions who may focus on different grape varieties but share a similar size, scale, and structure to us. It gives us a source of new referrals. And it gives our members another benefit to their membership. We sometimes hear from members who are thinking of canceling that they want to explore other wineries' offerings. Now we can help them do so!

What We've Seen So Far
We rolled out the idea in July, focusing initially on in-person visits for the busy summer travel season. That's been in place a little less than two months. In that time, we've seen about 50 guests who have identified themselves as members of other Wine Atlas Collective member wineries and taken advantage of their benefits here. We've sold them about $4,500 in wine and signed a couple up for one of our own wine clubs. That's not an earth-shaking number, but it's added about 2% to our tasting room totals. And we're still in early days. It usually takes people coming from other states a few months to plan a trip. So, we're likely not seeing the bulk of the impact yet.

Just as importantly, we've also heard from a few dozen of our own members that they've taken advantage of these benefits by visiting other Wine Atlas Collective wineries near where they live. We've had a good stretch signing up new club members in our tasting room, and seen an attrition rate in our primary club that is 30% lower than our full-year average. Now the sample size is tiny, so I'm not putting too much weight on this. But we know it's resonating with people we talk to. Just this week, we had guests from the east coast, members of Blenheim Vineyards, who decided to make a road trip and visit every one of the Wine Atlas Collective wineries:

What's Next
The next stage is to roll out the ability for members to use their benefits to have wines shipped to them. We're targeting this to come next month (members, watch your emails)! Then we've talked about ways to do events together, put together packages for auctions, do pop-up tastings or takeovers at each other's locations, and more. If you're reading this and have ideas of the sorts of collaborations that would appeal to you, please share them in a comment. We're still very much looking for input!

In the longer run, we're looking at how we expand membership to new wineries and new regions. Wouldn't it be fun to incorporate a winery from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? Or Santa Barbara? The Rogue Valley in southern Oregon? Or the Sierra Foothills? All these and more are on the table. But we're not in a hurry; we're going to take some time to figure out how best to make this Collective as valuable as possible for the eight founding members before we start looking at adding more.

For years, businesses have grouped together to provide value to their members. Think of reciprocal benefits for country clubs, or airline alliances, or alumni associations. It's exciting that we get to figure out how to apply this idea to wine. If you're a member at Tablas Creek, we hope you'll enjoy this new benefit. If you're a member at one of the other Wine Atlas Collective wineries, we look forward to welcoming you here. And if you're neither, we hope this is the little nudge that will encourage you to visit one of us and learn what we're all about.