This week’s wine news: Yes, wine marketing is terrible. Plus more bad news about wine sales and another insight into ancient wine
• Pay more attention: Lulie Halstead, the founder of the Wine Intelligence consultancy and a long=time pal of the blog, doesn’t pull any punches: “From what I’ve seen in more than 20 years knee-deep in the world of wine marketing, many wine businesses simply don’t ‘do’ marketing very well.” Which, as regular readers know, is one of the WC’s perpetual lamentations. Halstead covers all the bases: Winespeak, too many choices, and too much confusion. Compounding that, she writes, is that producers don’t care enough about marketing and when they do, it’s mostly about price cutting: “But we as marketers don’t help ourselves. We really don’t.” Hopefully, someone other than a cranky ex-newspaper reporter will read the piece and take heed.
• Even worse news: The latest wine sales data is so bad that even the group that compiles the numbers noticed: “negative growth” may be the new normal. The survey, which measures the amount of wine wholesalers sell, found that wine fell almost seven percent in volume between April 2022 and March 2023. It was especially bad for restaurants, where one of the gauges found that it was significantly cheaper to drink at home – so consumers were staying at home. The culprit for all this? The survey hedges a bit, but does mention higher prices. Shocking news, yes?
• No drinking for women? The WC has long been fascinated with any and all news about ancient wine, and this one is particularly interesting: “During the earliest periods of Rome’s history and up until the Middle Republican period, it was a socially sanctioned custom for husbands to punish their wives for drinking. Many Ancient Roman sources speak of female drinking and adultery concurrently.” I wonder: Have the neo-Prohibitionists thought of doing this?