Premium Wine Sales Decelerating

      The Big Short

It's easy to tell people what they want to hear. It's harder to tell them what they don't want to hear.

In 2007 I saw the above chart that tracked US home prices versus median family income. With other indicators in the market, I was convinced there was a real estate bubble already in the process of bursting and I started talking about it in speeches. The result of my prescience? I stopped getting speaking invitations and in one speech had the organizer ask if I could be a little more cheery. 

People don't want to consider the downside risk in business when things are going well. 

If I told you today what you wanted to hear, I would say that wine consumption is growing in both volume and dollars and consumers are continuing to trade up above $9.00. I would tell you that grape prices are at an all-time high and trending higher right along with land prices. 

That's true and might get me more important speaking engagements, but I'd rather you know about an underlying trend I'm seeing that's more than a little concerning. If I'm right, it's going to change the way you are thinking about business right now.

Podcast: An Industry View Through Rob McMillan's Wine Glass

 

I had the opportunity to visit Christian Oggenfuss and Geralyn Brostrom at the Napa Valley Wine Academy just after the release of the State of the Industry Report. We sat down to an open mic over a glass of wine and explored several of my perspectives on the business as well as the story of how the Wine Division of SVB was created, and why we started producing the State of the Industry Report.

After you get though the early part of the podcast which sounds a little like a This is Your Life show on your's truly, at about the 15:00 mark we start to get into some of the concepts discussed in the report. The questions I cover are:

Restaurant Wine Sales Collapsing for Small Wineries

      I will Always Love You

Every credible measure that I see regarding restaurant wine sales is trending negative for the small family run wineries. Why? What's behind the declining trend? Economics? Changing consumer attitudes? Conspiracies from wholesalers? Big wineries displacing the small ones? It's not due to a lack of desire from restaurant owners.

Restaurateurs love the wine business. The business is worthy of their love because it enhances the enjoyment of the food served to their customers. It's practical for the restaurant trade to love wine because restaurants themselves make better margins on bar sales compared to food sales. Wine for the restaurant trade is still an important part of success, but sales opportunities to restaurants are collapsing for small wineries.

Replay: SVB Direct to Consumer Survey

We had a good time on set delivering several perspectives on the SVB/WBM annual Direct to Consumer survey. For those aficionados of our surveys and telecasts, you might note a shift in the title but it's just reflective of how we've evolved the survey questions.

We used to call this survey the Tasting Room Survey but over time we started to realize tasting rooms were only part of the formula for success, so we started asking more questions about wine club metrics. Now we have several years of benchmarks from which we can determine trends in clubs and in tasting rooms.

SVB Annual DtC Benchmarks

Direct to Consumer sales now represent 60% of the average winery's revenue, but the real growth in direct sales has only taken place over the past decade, dramatically accelerating in the past 5 years. While it might seem like wineries have been doing this for a long time, it's difficult for me to say direct sales have been a professional discipline.

In 2013 I published one of my more popular posts addressing the problem the industry faced in finding good Direct to Consumer Managers. Since it was a new discipline, it wasn't possible to find experienced managers. That is starting to evolve with time, but we are still scratching and clawing our way to direct sales success, learning from each other as we go and playing a little bit of follow the leader. Some of that is good and some not so good which underscores the importance of data.

The Tough Questions Wine Clubs Face

 

After many years of flailing away looking for the right strategy, we are seeing DtC sales homogenize around a common theme. Wineries build a tasting room with a design statement. That's 'the experience.' Customers come to the winery, pay a fee and receive a curated tasting of wine. At the end of the tasting, the customer is invited to join the wine club and somewhere around 7% accept. It's working, and if you believe the stats that came out yesterday, DtC sales in February 2017 were 37% higher than February 2016.

Annual DtC Survey is Open!

Today, the eleven largest wineries are moving 80% of the wine sold in America, while distributors continue to march toward complete consolidation. The other 9,000 wineries in the U.S. are left to compete with each other for the remaining 20% of case sales.

Not their Fault

I don't blame wholesalers. They have no financial incentive to take on that mass of small customers. Add to that the decline in restaurant sales, which historically have been a large part of family wine sales, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that Direct to Consumer sales are required for the survival of small family wineries now. It's really their only viable path to market, and yet the industry itself is still barely novices in selling wine direct.