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Advice to Wineries

A collection of 66 posts

Why "California's Driest Year on Record" is less serious (and more) than you're hearing

As January 2014 dawned, California residents were greeted with a collection of terrifying headlines about the lack of rain the state received in 2013. The Weather Channel posted a national story titled "Record Driest Year in California, Parts of Oregon". The San Francisco Chronicle warned "After dry

What Facebook's News Feed Changes Mean for the Wine Community

There was a bit of a flap in social media circles a couple of weeks ago when Ad Age broke the story that Facebook would be reducing the organic reach of pages and requiring those pages that wanted to reach a significant percentage of their fans to advertise to do

Every now and then you get a particularly meaningful compliment...

The wine business is hard. It may not get talked about a lot, but it is. There are huge start-up costs, an ever-growing number of wineries which crowd the marketplace and compete for your existing customers, and a shrinking number of distributors that combine with a relentless stream of wines

Surviving Consolidation in the Wholesale Wine Market

This week, like much of the California wine community, I'll be making the trek up to Sacramento for the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium. "Unified", as this enormous trade show is known within the indistry, is a chance to see the newest in technology, to check

Is the bloom off the user review site rose?

Last March, I wrote the post Has TripAdvisor overtaken Yelp for winery visitors, suggesting that of the two major user-review Web sites, TripAdvisor seemed to be replacing Yelp as the preferred forum for people writing user reviews of Paso Robles wineries. The graphic I included in that post showed a

Common-sense sustainability

I'm in New York this week, helping kick off the release of the 2010 Esprit de Beaucastel and 2010 Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc. My hotel, like most hotels these days, has one of the signs that tells you that in order to help protect the environment, my sheets

The power of print

Last weekend I noticed a small flurry of online wine club signups, as well as a surge in online orders. We hadn't sent out a recent email (we do that at the very end of the month). We hadn't gotten any particularly noteworthy press. It wasn&

Nine lessons the Kimpton Hotel Group offers wineries

Last week, Meghan and I escaped for a night down to Santa Barbara to see David Sedaris perform. We stayed downtown at the Canary Hotel, a few blocks away from the Arlington Theater where he would be performing. When we checked in, it was during the evening wine hour that

How to make the most of trade and consumer tastings

Last Sunday, I was standing behind the Tablas Creek table at the Family Winemakers of California tasting in San Francisco. We were one of 340 wineries pouring wines for more than 1700 trade and 700 consumers (an additional 1700+ trade came on Monday). Family Winemakers (as it's known

Building a successful winery tasting room experience before, during and after the visit

Next week, I'll be speaking as part of a panel at the Unified Grape and Wine Symposium in Sacramento. The panel is titled "How to Make Your Tasting Room More Profitable" and is being organized and moderated by California's most respected tasting room consultant,