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Advice to Wineries

A collection of 70 posts

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,

Truth, Fiction and Self-fulfilling Prophecy in Wholesale Wine Sales

Sure, consumers are cutting back. And sure, sizzle is out in favor of substance. But it is my belief that the wholesale wine market is perpetuating and strengthening the much-trumpeted phenomenon that consumers are only buying the least expensive wines. The mechanism is that of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Making the most of time in the market

I had a distributor tell me last week that I should provide "supplier training" to their other wineries. I laughed; it's good to feel appreciated. But then I thought, why not? There are lots of wineries, across the spectrum, who are realizing that they need to

Succeeding in a poor economy: it's all about the fundamentals

I get questions every day from people asking how our sales are holding up overall and what we're doing to help survive the current struggling economy. Most people look surprised, and then relieved, to hear we're doing pretty well, all things considered. Our wholesale sales were

A winery blog? Who needs it?

As the Tablas Creek blog has gotten more established, I've started to receive questions from other wineries about how to get started. I have written posts on Learning How to Blog and on the (somewhat related) Usability Lessons for Winery Web Sites. Still, reading a surprisingly pessimistic assessment

Usability Lessons for Winery Web Sites

I come at Web site design a little differently than most winery principals. My background is in high tech; before moving out to Paso Robles in 2002 to help manage Tablas Creek, I was a Senior Training Manager and Curriculum Director at WestLake Internet Training, which developed and taught classroom-

Learning how to Blog: a few year-end reflections on two years of blogging

Although I started this blog about two years ago, it's really only in the past year that I've felt I've found my voice. The major benefit of blogging, for me, is that I get a chance to clarify my own thoughts on issues I&