Winecast 71: Paul Tincknell and solving all of wine’s problems

The blog’s wine marketing guru solves wine’s generation gap and offers insight on making wine popular again

Paul Tincknell, a partner in the Napa marketing consultancy of Tincknell & Tincknell, is one of the really smart people in the wine business. And I would say that even if he wasn’t a long-time friend of the blog.

He and I have discussed wine’s problems many times — the generation gap, abstinence, premiumization, its reliance on the aging Baby Boomers, and so on and so forth. So I asked him to do this podcast to offer his perspective and his solutions, and they make very good sense.

Included in our discussion:

• Wine is not like beef or milk, where a one size fits all marketing approach — “Got Milk?” — could be effective. The industry is fragmented and splintered, and not just between big and small producers, but because of pricing. Milk and beef inhabit a narrow price range; wine’s is enormous, and high-end producers have little in common with those on the lower end.

• Wine spends very little marketing, anyway, and especially compared to beer and spirits. And no, we’re not quite sure why that is.

• Wine’s approach to its customers is wrong-headed. It sells them wine to drink for special occasions, and not wine to drink because wine is enjoyable. Paul describes this as “celebratory” vs. “cultural;” that is, no one sees wine as something to drink with dinner unless dinner is a big deal — a holiday, date night, or a dinner party. So why can’t we have a bottle of $10 supermarket wine on Wednesday night to drink with sheet pan chicken? Because the industry doesn’t encourage that. It wants us to buy a $25 or $30 bottle for a dinner that takes four hours to cook and requires expensive and hard to find ingredients.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 22 minutes long and takes up 15 megabytes. Quality is excellent. Even better, I hardly interrupted, save for one rant about too complicated recipes.

More wine podcasts:
• Winecast 70: Ray DelMuro of Refresh Glass and recycling wine bottles
• Winecast 69: Nick Vorpagel and the dilemma of the independent wine retailer
• Winecast 68: Clara Klein and restaurant wine after the pandemic