“Wine is in a crisis.” Wine consumption in the U.S. is at a 20-year low. The sky is falling, say the people who observe such things. Some say it’s because younger people show little interest in wine, instead consuming cocktails, seltzers, weed, or whatever else is available to them. Some say Americans are drinking less because of health concerns, others say neo-prohibitionists are out to demonize alcohol consumption. Some say the crisis is mainly due to economics: bottle prices, by some estimates, have risen more than 30 percent since 2019. These days, negative talk of the crisis and assumptions about its causes are the loudest conversations you hear in wine circles.
We’re not denying that there are profound structural challenges happening—driven by oversupply, inflation, behavioral shifts, extreme weather—that are destabilizing wine culture around the world. But after several years of hand wringing over the crisis, now is the time to actually focus on solutions. Saying “wine is in a crisis” is an example of a stuck conversation in wine, an endless loop of industry chatter that’s never resolved. We all need to change that conversation. That’s what this white paper is about.
In this time of supposed crisis, it confuses us why the industry keeps running away from the very customers who care most about its products. If we indeed face a crisis, we believe it’s only worsened by ignoring quality wine’s core consumer. Or worse: boring those core consumers to tears. Which is why we believe there is an opportunity that most everyone is overlooking.
The fact is, there still is a critical mass of people who are deeply passionate about quality wine. What wine faces right now is a crisis of discovery. How do you even begin to create demand for quality wines anymore? How do you introduce consumers to exciting new bottles? This crisis of discovery is affecting a lot of you reading this: those who work in small and mid-sized wineries, or with local importers or distributors, or for independent retailers, or in restaurants that still care about what’s on the wine list.
Wine is headed into uncharted territory right now: post-critic, post-influencer, post-sommelier, post-collector. The influence of the natural wine movement and 100-point scale are in their fading days. Wine media is broken, public relations is a waste of money, and distributors are now just logistics companies that can no longer create demand for small, unknown artisan wineries. Meanwhile, consumer choice at most retailers and restaurants in America is being choked out by conglomerate wine suppliers and consolidation at the distributor tier.
Only a renewed focus on introducing core consumers to wines of discovery will solve this crisis. And that’s going to require a new mindset and a new strategy to face the challenge of creating demand in this new era. That’s also what this white paper is about.
“Demystification” has led to this crisis of discovery.
For years, the industry has promoted “demystification,” messaging that aims to “simplify” wine, wooing newbies with insincere flattery, and flattening wine’s complexity for mass appeal. Their hope has been that new-to-wine drinkers will “save” the entire category. So much energy and resources is now unevenly centered on people who don’t care about wine, haven’t shown up, and likely never will.
The widespread over-simplification has created a situation where, if someone tries to explain more than a few sentences about wine, it’s quickly dismissed as too “snobby.” This discouragement of productive communication is terrible for wine. After all, how else do people learn about anything they’re interested in—whether it’s baking or baseball or birding.
All this focus on demystification has come at the expense of wine’s core customer—of all ages— whose interest has never faltered. When the industry starts apologizing for wine’s depth, it strips away exactly what draws in real wine consumers. It’s an uncomfortable thing for many in the industry to accept, that the most knowledgeable and discerning wine drinkers—the people much too easily dismissed as “snobs”—are actually their best customers.
Demystification hasn’t solved the wine crisis. Instead, it’s helped create a popular acceptance of middling bulk wine, made with manipulation and additives, which is misrepresented as quality wine to new drinkers. These branded, mass-market wines with little transparency—force fed by corporate suppliers with deep pockets—do not allow curious new customers to explore their own taste in a meaningful way. When someone starts their wine journey with these poor-quality bottles, they often don’t go any further.
It doesn’t have to be that way, but we need to start having different conversations around wine.
So what is a “wine of discovery”?
We define a wine of discovery as a compelling, affordable bottle that leads to a consumer’s better understanding of wine, and of their own tastes. A wine of discovery is priced low enough to take a chance on, yet offers a distinct enough drinking experience to express where it comes from and how it’s made.
“Affordable” is certainly a slippery term, but if we need to name a price let’s say that it retails for $21 to $29. There are thousands of wines of discovery languishing in importers’ and distributors’ portfolios. Wines of discovery can be fascinating, but they are also practical: They repay an adventurous drinker by providing excellent value.
These wines of discovery can come from any grape and from anywhere. They can be made from the popular noble grapes, or from an obscure local variety. They can come from new-wave producers in a legacy region or from old-school producers in an appellation you’ve never heard of. They can express a forgotten style that’s been revived or an emerging style that’s yet to find its audience.
The joy of wine is all about discovery. We all know that if we want consumers to find good-value wines, we’re going to end up pouring them things they don’t know…yet. It’s just like anything else in life: If you always stick to what you know, you’re always going to be stuck with only what you know. The wine industry, by actively undermining discovery, is trapping itself in a death spiral.
The “starter wine” is a myth.
A wine of discovery is very different from what the industry currently promotes as “starter wines” or “entry-level wines.” Those terms have become empty euphemisms for industrial wines that are manipulated, often full of additives, to hit an artificially-low price point, and then force-fed to consumers through shady distribution practices. As we said of these branded wines in our July piece, “The Sysco-ification of Wine”: “These wines aren’t popular because people seek them out. They’re popular because, in most cases, it’s the only thing available. To someone who’s only ever been exposed to this kind of wine…how can you even suggest a better-made alternative?”
“Starter wines” are defended in the name of “recruiting” new wine drinkers, presumably those with so-called “less-developed” palates. The theory espoused by the industry is that these new drinkers will “start” with these poor-quality wines and then evolve, as they get older, to consuming more sophisticated, higher-end beverages. This is a bogus concept, and there is no conclusive marketing study that backs it up. The same percentage of people would be just as likely to move to high-end wines from kombucha or juice boxes or frappuccinos. This false starter-wine narrative is among the most cynical marketing tactics. It gives corporate wineries cover for knowingly making and selling bad wine, creating a dead end with no path to quality.
It’s also condescending to the younger generation they hope to snare. As Caroline wrote about, in her May piece “Gen Z to Wine: Please Stop Condescending to Us”: “Embedded in the entire demystification agenda is an unspoken assumption: That young people need wine to be easier because they can’t handle complexity, aspiration, or even a simple conversation with a sommelier, that the only way to engage young people is to meet them at the bottom rather than invite them up.”
Here’s the truth: Over the past several years, numbers show that consumers are rejecting this sort of poor-quality, artificially-priced, entry-level wine. American consumers have been telling us that, by and large, they do not want what the industry is selling for under $20.
Four years ago, the annual “State of the Wine Industry” report from Silicon Valley Bank made it clear: “The wine industry has allowed the lower-priced entry-level wines to be produced without transparency as to ingredients and in a homogenous and uninteresting way that’s unlikely to appeal to those young consumers who want to drink better and drink less today.” If you want to recruit new drinkers, why would anyone lead with such bad wine? At those lower prices, there are dozens of other beverage options: cocktails, canned RTDs and hard seltzers, beer, cider, even a $40 to 50 bottle of spirits that might be consumed in several sessions over the course of weeks or months.
One could make the case that the entire “wine crisis” is actually a crisis created by mass-market, industrial wines. And since those wines have choked out competition, the entire industry is suffering from this crisis of discovery. What these ubiquitous, low-quality starter wines do is to rob consumers of the chance to experience the beautiful differences from wine to wine, which is how taste is ultimately developed. Without the chance to develop their own tastes, consumers will always have to rely on the “reliable”—aka homogenous, boring, manipulated—mass-market industrial wines, which completely obscure style, grape, and place.
Wine people are so worried about coming across as “snobs” or “elites” that they’ve lost the plot on promoting quality. As we said in the “Sysco-ification of Wine”: “This is why the anti-snob ‘drink what you like’ message not only fails, but ends up unequally promoting bad mass-market wines, protecting them from any kind of qualitative comparison with better wines. These mass-market wines are so ever-present and over-available that they’ve superseded even the average consumer’s own personal taste.”
The most basic answer to the wine industry’s crisis is to stop trying to convince young people to buy cheap, low-quality wine. Focus on the higher end. Focus on quality. Focus on transparency, sustainability, good farming, and all the other things that younger generations say they want. Do better!
Despite all of this, a consumer for wines of discovery actually exists.
The only real, long-term solution to this crisis is to create a larger demand for wines of discovery. If we want to develop a critical mass of lifelong wine lovers, we need to introduce them to the bottles that will help them understand the rich tapestry of wine, with its plethora of styles, and grapes, and places. Most importantly, these potential wine lovers will learn their own personal tastes within the wide world of wine. That’s hard work to create a demand like this, with few shortcuts. We need more people in the industry committed to that work.
We believe that the bar for developing a demand for wines of discovery is lower than most people think. Wine Opinions, a market research group, has defined “high-end wine consumers” as people who purchase one wine over $20 at least once a month. Let us repeat that: one wine over $20 at least once a month. These high-end wine consumers are essential to the wine industry, and they are not just old white people: 42 percent are between the ages of 21 to 39; 17 percent are Black Americans, 13 percent Latino, and 5 percent Asian.
But the industry also needs to rethink how it endlessly chases youth, and remember that 65 million Gen Xers are still alive in America. Sure, there are more Millennials (74 million) and Boomers (76 million). Yet consider that 35 percent of Gen Xers buy wine that costs between $50 and $99 at least once a year. Only 25 percent of Boomers and 29 percent of Millennials do the same. “Gen X is the largest purchaser of luxury wine in the United States,” Liz Thach, former president of the Wine Market Council, recently told Wine Enthusiast.
If we deal in pop-culture tropes—in addition to hard data—Gen X is also the last American generation that genuinely cared about “not selling out.” So there is plenty of opportunity to interest them in non-corporate wine.
Meanwhile, here is some good news: According to the Wine Market Council, total U.S. consumer spending on wine is up nearly 50 percent since 2018; according to the 2025 BMO Wine Market Report, the median increase in sales for wine priced between $20 and $50 grew by 12 percent; wineries with an average price of over $50 saw a median sales increase of 10 percent.
The average bottle of American wine rose 11 percent in 2025, the largest jump since 2021. The average price for a bottle of wine shipped directly from U.S. wineries in 2025 was $56.78, up from $50.53 in 2024. Those numbers come from the 2026 “Direct-to-Consumer Wine Shipping Report,” published by Sovos ShipCompliant, a software company in the alcohol industry. This report is a bellwether because the majority of U.S. wineries rely on direct-to-consumer sales for survival. And $56.78 is just the average for an entire nation with 50 wine-producing states. Average bottle prices in Napa Valley nearly touched $100 ($99.97, a nine percent increase).
Research clearly shows that sales of $20 to $30 wines are trending upward. But here’s the dilemma: the $20-$30 category makes up only about seven percent of the market. That’s still a lot of people, but we believe that the future of the wine industry will rise or fall based on creating more demand for wines of discovery in that $20 to $30 range.
To sell wines of discovery in this price range, we need to change the mindset and strategy on how to create demand.
This is not about trying to sell “obscure” or “nerdy” wines to “normal people.”
In the “Sysco-ification of Wine,” we depicted a broken system, where shady distribution practices choked out choice. These relentless tactics have warped wine consumers’ perception of what good wine costs.
We faced a lot of criticism and pushback to this article from what we call the “drink what you like” crowd. Their main argument is something like this (taken from a real comment): “These kinds of takes hurt the industry overall. We have to celebrate on-ramps. If people want to drink Caymus, fine. If they want to drink small producers and underrepresented regions, dope. But they’ll never get to the latter if we’re dismantling their path forward.”
We’ve already dealt with the idea that there are “starter wines” that provide “on ramps.” But more damaging is the false dichotomy suggested, as if there is only “Caymus” and other big brands on the one hand versus tiny producers on some mountaintop nobly hand-crafting a few hundred bottles per year on the other.
Let’s be clear: There are thousands of wines of discovery that sit between corporate industrial wine brands and tiny artisan-made wines. What we’ve depicted is the pervasiveness of mass-market industrial wine…versus literally all other wines. The conflict is between “wine-based products” with zero transparency versus real wines made with integrity. That choice is what the American distribution tier, through its consolidation and tactics, is choking out. There are plenty of larger wineries who make honest wines that are getting blocked out of the distribution game as well.
Even though Jason wrote about “strange, obscure, and underappreciated wine” in his 2018 book Godforsaken Grapes, we are not proposing that the industry can be saved by selling people on little-known grapes from tiny vineyards in off-the-beaten-path corners of the world. While some of these are certainly wines of discovery, we are casting a much larger net.
Consider categories such as Langhe Nebbiolo, or Loire cabernet franc, or Austrian grüner veltliner, or chardonnay from Maconnais in southern Burgundy, or Chianti Classico, or red blends from the Rhône, or pinot noir from California’s Central Coast, or old-vine zinfandel from Mendocino. These—and many more—can all be wines of discovery, and no serious wine person would call those obscure. Yet all of those categories offer hundreds of wines under $25 that offer better value—and a more engaging, compelling experience—than the manipulated big-brand wines, and offer wine drinkers a chance to discover something new.
Because we know there is always the chance to misinterpret what we mean, we’ve compiled a Wines of Discovery Index that lists the types of wines we’re advocating for—all at similar price points to the branded, industrial mass-market wines we’ve highlighted.
A warped perception exists of what good—and bad—wine costs.
If people make the case at all for the mass-market wines, it’s usually based on price. The corporate wineries and their distributors have managed to convince wide swaths of American drinkers that their wines are priced better than wines of discovery.
That’s just patently untrue, yet another artificially-created narrative. As you can see in our Wines of Discovery Index, many wines of discovery can absolutely compete on price.
As we were writing this white paper, we each visited a local wine store near where we live. Jason visited Boulevard Super Liquors in Marmora, New Jersey. This store is just over the bridge from Ocean City, and serves a resort community where the median home prices are more than $1.3 million—exactly the sort of people with disposable income who the wine industry should be courting. Yet when you walk into Boulevard Super Liquors, three of very first bottles you see on the end cap of the first aisle are these ubiquitous wines:
Josh Cellars ‘Legacy’ Red Blend 2023, $20.99
Decoy Cabernet Sauvignon 2023, $26.99
Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio 2025, $29.99
Moving into the first aisle, there was La Crema ‘Monterey’ Chardonnay 2023 ($19.99); Josh Cellars Pinot Noir 2024, ($23.99); Joel Gott ‘815’ Cabernet Sauvignon 2022 ($22.99); Bread & Butter Chardonnay 2023 ($18.99); Daou Cabernet Sauvignon 2023 ($29.99). Oh, and remember Caymus, which the “drink what you like” crowd often raises as an “on ramp”? The 2023 Caymus Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon (in one liter format) is on sale in the “premium” section for $149.99.
Meanwhile, Caroline visited Nino Salvaggio International Marketplace, a popular and award-winning specialty grocery store in Bloomfield, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit with a median household income of $162,788. When you peek your head into the enclosed floor-to-ceiling wine section, complete with a massive chandelier and sliding library style ladders, your eyes are drawn to a large display in the center. On the display, lined twenty-four bottles wide, you’ll find Justin Cabernet Sauvignon ($27.99), Whispering Angel Rosé ($24.99), Bonanza Cabernet Sauvignon ($19.99). The prominence of this display suggests, “no need to explore any further.”
What is the consumer meant to do with such a display? Are these the kinds of wines that are going to excite newbies to become lifelong wine drinkers? Are these mass market selections offering any particular value, either in quality or price? Again, in our Wines of Discovery Index we offer 50 wines of discovery at the same price points. A store could just as prominently display the wines we’re talking about, and those bottles would likely sell at a similar velocity. So why do stores—as well as restaurants and bars and event spaces and country clubs and airports and anywhere wine is sold in America—continue to offer the same ubiquitous mass market selections?
These are mostly rhetorical questions, by the way. None of us are that naive, are we? The crisis of discovery is systemic, and it’s time to challenge that system.
Beyond the crisis lies opportunity.
For those of you who work with wines of discovery, it’s surely frustrating to watch the wheels of the American wine market turn. But we have dwelled enough on the negative, let’s turn our attention to some potential solutions.
The crisis of discovery in wine is not about one challenge alone. We need to reevaluate how we approach distribution, media messaging, and marketing narratives.
Today, we’re going to talk specifically about distribution. Over the next several months, we will talk about the other key factors challenging the way forward—and solutions to meet those challenges.
The D-Word. The first challenge is distribution.
Wineries who make wines of discovery need to create their own demand. This is the most important lesson of the contemporary wine market and perhaps the most misunderstood.
Wine distributors are no longer able to create demand for wines of discovery, and they haven’t been able to for a long time. In the 1990s, there were over 3,000 independent wine distributors operating in the U.S. Today, that number is about 1,000. During the same period, the number of U.S. wineries has grown from around 3,000 to more than 11,000. The TTB approves more than 115,000 new wine labels every year. Yet a whopping 81 percent of wine sold in the U.S. moves through just the top ten distributors.
When the majority of the market share is controlled by large companies with portfolios of upwards of 7,000 brands, it means the marketing dollars and sales priorities of a handful of conglomerate wineries suck all the air out of the room. If you are a wine of discovery in the same portfolio as these giants, your chances of being seen are slim.
Consider these numbers from “The Sysco-ification of Wine”:
71 percent of wine in the United States is controlled by the top 11 wine suppliers.
A single company, Gallo, controls more than a third of all wine in the market.
America’s largest distributor, Southern Glazer’s, controls roughly a third of all distribution at around $26 billion in projected revenue.
Big wine suppliers create their own demand and fulfill that demand by partnering with a distributor who has strong logistics and network. If smaller, independent wineries hope to start taking back the market-share lost over years of consolidation from the conglomerates, they will need to look beyond the traditional path to market.
A wine of discovery can rise above this distribution challenge.
There was a time where it was acceptable for wine producers to not have an understanding of the different markets they wished to enter. But since distributors can no longer create demand, wineries themselves have become solely responsible for positioning themselves for the markets they wish to do business in, and communicating that clearly to potential distributors and importers.
Selling a wine of discovery within the U.S. three-tier distribution system begins with a winery finding an importer (foreign winery) or distributor (domestic winery). These relationships begin with a sales pitch where a winery must succinctly communicate who they are, what they do, and why anyone should care. Often, portfolio managers deliberately will not have one-on-one meetings with prospective wineries. Rather, they will taste a number of new products in one sitting with a panel of decision makers from their team to maximize everyone’s limited time and critically compare potential new products.
Essentially, this is a wine of discovery’s elevator pitch. It’s a crucial first step and the first opportunity to be won or lost. Producers often assume (or hope) the quality of their wine will speak for itself. In our current moment of inventory overload, good quality wine is not enough. It must also immediately answer three key questions in the mind of an importer or distributor: 1) who is this wine for? 2) where will this wine be sold? and 3) is this wine a good value for the money?
Although it may feel unromantic, a winery that is serious about selling its wine will lead with this type of market positioning. The pitch to a potential distributor must be compelling, not performative. All too often, wines of discovery share a similar story—family-owned, farmed by hand with respect to local traditions, a focus on wine quality, and from a lesser known place or grape—and because of this are unable to distinguish themselves from their more established competition or place their wines in the context of the market they are trying to enter.
For the foreign winery entering the American market, securing an introductory conversation with a prospective importer can be an incredibly high hurdle. Portfolio managers are inundated with emails from wineries looking for representation. We have seen wineries slide into importers DMs on Instagram, send samples without any pre-conversation, or send blanket emails to the entire staff of an importer. Needless to say, none of these tactics are strategic nor should be used to secure an importer.
What wines of discovery need is a new type of representative that speaks to both distributors and importers. A winery needs someone who can connect the puzzle pieces for them. Someone with not only the relationships to make introductions, but to match wineries with the right importer or distributor for them based on their specific goals and market positioning.
Find the people advocating for wines of discovery.
What’s exacerbating the distribution dilemma in restaurants and bars right now is an industry-wide elimination—or at least de-emphasis—of the sommelier position. Sommeliers have always been advocates for wines of discovery. But what happens now as hospitality gradually becomes post-sommelier?
This idea was first introduced in VinePair’s 2022 article titled “Where Have All the Sommeliers Gone?” which looked at how the sommelier position changed during COVID, when many restaurants sold off their wine collections for the cash necessary to survive. According to VinePair, “this shift from long-term to short-term thinking is one reason that sommeliers have dwindled.” In many cases, the sommelier position has been absorbed into the manager’s role, with that employee expected to squeeze in wine steward duties as part of their existing job.
In 2024, New York Times’ Eric Asimov suggested we are in “The Twilight of the American Sommelier,” saying that “many serious, wine-oriented restaurants are doing without. Instead, those positions once dedicated to wine are now often hybrids with servers, bartenders, or managers handling wine in addition to their other duties.”
In many cases, one employee will be responsible for the wine program across multiple restaurants. This effectively creates another bottle neck from the distributor to the outlet. All in all, the effect of conglomerate wineries eclipsing smaller wineries with their outsized resources— and fewer wine buyers actually seeking out wines of discovery—is a wine world devoid of motivation or curation.
Those who sell wines of discovery need to find those motivated curators in their local markets, and build great relationships with them.
Which raises another industry-wide question: Given how the sommelier is being de-emphasized, how is WSET, or any of the other wine education programs, addressing this dilemma? These organizations are pumping out more certifications than ever. To what end, especially if the number of jobs is shrinking? It reminds us a little bit of how MFA in creative writing programs swelled at the turn of the 21st century, just as people stopped reading books and print media collapsed.
The silver lining—and the opportunity—is that there are now more than 20,000 Americans currently enrolled in WSET certification courses, meaning there are more people than ever who can be ambassadors for wines of discovery.
Find the people who embrace wine’s core values.
We believe that the majority of people who work in wine share a similar set of core values: a care for quality, respect for tradition, and the desire to share the enjoyment of delicious wines with others. What is surprising to us is how many people leave those initial beliefs behind once they are faced with the hard work of selling wine.
There is such a dramatic divide between the types of people who sell wines of discovery and the type of people who sell mass-market wines. The two sides have a vast misunderstanding, a complete unknowing of the other. Due to the wine industry’s own infighting, sales representatives—the boots on the ground drivers of demand—have bifurcated into two groups: “wine people” and “sales people.”
A culture of laziness has also crept into the wine industry, encouraged by decades of booming sales, and has bred a generation of decision makers across all three tiers of wine who too often rest on the idea that a good wine will sell itself. As wine’s distribution network has consolidated into a bottleneck for suppliers over the past three decades, the people selling wine at the distributor tier and buyers at the retail and on-premise level have gotten all too comfortable with a hands-off approach to selling wine.
Conceding their expertise and market insight to customers who, as we have addressed, are unfairly swayed by corporate suppliers. Often turning on their core values to supply their customer a wine that they know is low quality, dishonest, and bad for the wine industry on the whole to make an easy buck.
However, there is a space to sell wines of discovery in the everyday places where people drink in towns across America. That requires the sales reps who self-identify as “wine people” to humble themselves enough to walk into accounts that don’t present as wine-centric accounts and sell their wines of discovery. It’s the long-time, neighborhood Greek/Mediterranean place that’s packed every night, or the basic suburban liquor store, or the corner bar that surprisingly sells as much wine as Bud Light and High Noon. These are a long way from a hip natural wine bar in Bushwick or Silver Lake, but these places that can drive real discovery and demand in a way that’s local.
But the “wine people” who work in distribution need to show up to these places. If they don’t, the mass-market brands certainly will. In fact, there is no account the big distributors won’t call on. And so anyone trying to sell wines of discovery needs to adopt some of that mindset.
As we said before, we believe that most people who work with wine share a curiosity and thirst for discovery. It’s crucial to encourage the expansion of this curiosity with those beyond the wine bubble. Wine culture has no chance at survival if its greatest advocates keep it locked up in wine bars, small-plates restaurants, and specialty bottle shops.
Look beyond the traditional major markets.
Roughly 75 percent of Americans live in what people on the coasts sometimes call “flyover states.” These markets are constantly de-prioritized in the sale of fine wine. This has been a mistake.
“‘Let them drink Cupcake’ had been the de facto point of view. But this lazy modus operandi ignored the majority of wine-drinking Americans...in these oft-disregarded areas, drinkers are hungry and excited to discover their new favorite bottles,” said Wine Enthusiast in a December article entitled “The Hottest New Wine Scenes Are Hiding Out in Middle America.” The piece highlights the fine-wine scene in places such as Arkansas, North Dakota, and Texas. The fact is, wine knowledge and curiosity is as present in Middle America as it is on the Lower East Side.
The days of the well-known coastal importers holding all the cards are waning. More and more, we see small regional importers in places like Wisconsin, or Oregon, or North Carolina being the ideal partners for lesser-known wineries to better connect with the vast in-between of America.
To foreign producers, it may not even be clear where to begin in such a vast country. When a wine comes from a relatively unknown place or grape and has little name recognition, finding the right fit of importer is paramount. The growth of these smaller regional importers is a huge opportunity for wineries who produce wines of discovery.
For small wineries, finding one market (outside of New York or California) to go deep at to start is the perfect entry point to thoughtfully expand American business. It may ultimately end up that you have a different importer for every state, but start with one and focus deeply before expanding more broadly.
A strong point of view is essential.
Today, in this era of consolidation, distributors can’t simply sell a wine based on how good it is. Even some mid-sized distributors have more suppliers and brands in their book than make sense for the size of their team. The result is that wineries (and their importers) are now responsible for creating and communicating the ecosystem their wines exist in.
To do this, they have to present a point of view that’s distinct, timely, and resonates with current trends—and they have to offer it with conviction. A point of view isn’t about branding, and you can’t create one by simply hiring a typical social media manager or marketing guru. When distributors partner with importers and wineries who bring the necessary point of view, together they have the unique ability to share a wine’s story with authority and care, and cut through the big-brand noise.
Like it or not, wineries and importers must be able to tell a fresh story about their wines. Only those stakeholders are positioned to tell their story—not the way they think customers want to hear it, but the way it actually is. They must know who their wines are for (or at least be willing to find out) and speak directly to that audience. If they can’t do that themselves, they have to hire a partner who can.
In our next White Paper, to be published on September 15th, we’ll look at the changing wine media landscape, what’s working and not working anymore, and how messaging creates demand in the current media environment.
Wines of Discovery Index
Here are 50 examples of widely available wines of discovery—all of them at a comparable price point to industrial mass market wines.