I first fell in love with wine in 2013. I was working in banking at the time and had organized a dinner to celebrate the closing of a deal with the bankers, the management team of the company we were working for, and the lawyers. We had reserved the private room at Locanda Verde, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan, which had a hefty minimum attached. With only about 12 people at the dinner however, the only way we could meet the minimum was by ordering wine from the Reserve wine list. I distinctly remember my MD ordering a variety of wines from Piedmont, including several Barolos, and I will never forget how delicious those wines were. Since then, wines from Piedmont have always been my wine of choice (although I stick to the Barberas that are <$10 a bottle).
When I traveled to Italy the following summer, I spent a day touring vineyards in Montalcino, and grew to love Sangiovese wines as well. I will never forget the vineyard Podere Il Cocco, where my friend and I spent nearly 5 hours with the vineyard owner, who had taken over the family business and managed the production of large volumes of Brunello di Montalcino by himself.
I love that wine is a universal language that can bring people of all ages, backgrounds, and socioeconomic statuses together. Similar to food, it is something that people can easily bond over, and can immediately bring joy to someone's face. In response to the question "what would you do if you could have any job in the world," I have always answered that I would own a vineyard in Tuscany with a restaurant attached to it, bringing together my love for both food and wine.
I am also fascinated by consumer brands, and having spent a lot of time analyzing brands in the apparel, accessories, and restaurant spaces, I am interested in learning what makes for a compelling and sustainable wine brand. Is branding even important to a wine drinker? I am curious how wine producers think about creating authentic customer experiences, and differentiating their products, given that the wine market is growing increasingly crowded. Lastly, I spent the summer at a direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand in the beauty category; similar to wine, beauty is a category where consumers have historically been reluctant to make purchases online, and I am interested to learn how wine producers and retailers think about increasing e-commerce penetration.
@Shabdha, I thoroughly enjoyed your take on wine as a universal language and need to chase you down to teach me more about Italian wine. I too remember drinking Barolo at an event in New York, but that is where my knowledge ends. While in other parts of my life, I consider myself adventurous, I haven't ventured to explore Italian wines and tend to avoid that section of the aisle altogether.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to respond to your questions on branding and customer experience in the wine industry. This summer, I spent four weeks working with a vineyard in Napa. I mapped the landscape of high-end Cabernet and Bordeaux brands (above a certain price point, making the universe of brands to explore surprisingly manageable) and met with tenured winemakers in the valley to hear how they think about the industry and if they were to begin again today, where they would see differential opportunity. My thoughts are thus grounded in some part personal experience, another part qualitative research, and another, insights from those who build wine brands and curate customer experiences for a living. My lens is predominantly high-end and Napa-centric.
In my conversations, brand image arose time and time again as the single-handed most important factor in a winery's success today. This applies to all winemakers, from what I'll call "digital brands" (where the winemaker produces wine by procuring grapes from vineyards he or she does not own) to storied vineyards that have churned off outstanding wines for half a century.
One winemaker commented on authenticity as "absolutely crucial." For this winemaker and some others, the brand is built upon the property and the place, not the owner. In the early 1990s, this winemaker and his wife purchased one of the aforementioned storied vineyards, whose grapes had produced some of the finest single-designant vineyard wines in Napa for decades. He built a brand that bore his family's name but in its story, worshipped the land. Due to limited production, their wines are as rare as they are exquisite. When building a website, the owner wanted "visitors [to] immerse themselves in the property and delve deep into the land, its history and its people." The winemaker sold his vineyard in 2013, and today, the wine produced off of that vineyard bears only the name of the vineyard itself.
That same winemaker immediately embarked on a new project to buy an assortment of vineyards across the valley and produce a wine of similar caliber under an entirely new brand. In creating this brand, he could not rely on their old vineyard's halo and the family-named label wine enthusiasts had grown to trust. To evoke the same "sense of place," he and his team built a world-class wine facility with a hospitality house solely dedicated to entertainment and cultivating customer relationships. He described the process of rebuilding as both exciting and exceedingly difficult; his ownership certainly gives the label legitimacy, but without a history and a plot of land, they have had to carefully craft experiences through which a new generation of wine drinkers can connect to the brand. At that price point, where the wines are all outstanding no matter who you patronize, telling an authentic, compelling story and enabling consumers to feel part of it becomes a key to success.
A few brands I grew to admire over the summer are listed here. You'll see they've invested heavily in branding/design (although some are simply magical places in their own right):
- Realm Cellars (https://www.realmcellars.com/)
- Abreu (http://abreuvineyards.com/)
- Bond (https://bondestates.com/)