Most wineries overlook simple chances to capture valuable insights
into their patrons’ preferences and buying habits.
By Alex Caffarini
Recently, I visited a winery in southern New Jersey. In the tasting room, I selected five wines to try, and the associate handed me a rate sheet for feedback. I was impressed. Of the 12 wineries I’d visited across six states (post-pandemic), this was only one to ask. But even they fell short of the mark: they never asked for my contact information.
Most wineries overlook these simple chances to capture valuable insights into their patrons’ preferences and buying habits — information that could lead to more wine sales.
And here’s the irony: unlike other businesses that pay to conduct market research, wineries get paid to do it! Your tasting room, online and onsite sales, events, offsite tastings and (if you have them) your bistro and B&B, all serve as channels by which you can learn from your customers and, ultimately, sell more wine.
An Untapped Marketing Incubator
Your tasting room is a goldmine for customer insights. Yet, too often, it’s treated purely as a sales floor.
Imagine if that New Jersey winery’s rate sheet asked me for a bit more: age, income range, gender and contact information. They could have learned that:
Alex Caffarini prefers dry reds like Cabs and Pinots. Let’s send him offers featuring those wines and suggest others he might enjoy.
Now, multiply that across hundreds of patrons. Patterns emerge. Perhaps high-income men aged 45-54 prefer dry reds, while younger college-educated women gravitate toward sweeter whites. With that knowledge, the winery could then send each group a marketing promotion tailored to its preferences, with higher response rates.
This winery would also have learned which wines are most often tasted and which wines are most frequently tasted together, which could help them:
- Promote bestsellers or spotlight hidden gems
- Create curated bundles and flights
- Design targeted offers that drive wine sales.
The tasting room offers an abundance of low-hanging fruit that most wineries aren’t even reaching for.
Built-in Focus Groups
In-home and online tastings are another overlooked source of insight. Many winery employees conducting them focus on educating participants and often get frustrated when participants break off and chatter among themselves. But instead of fighting those conversations, listen to them: they’re telling you what they really think.
Try stimulating discussion with the participants. Prepare a guide of themes to cover during the tasting — appearance, aroma, taste, pairing, price, etc. — and ask open-ended questions. The chatter now becomes a focus group in action.
While this qualitative feedback isn’t as measurable as sales or survey data, it provides rich context on why customers love (or dislike) certain wines. These insights can inspire new offerings, marketing ideas and customer experiences.
A Treasure Trove of Insights
The sale doesn’t end when the customer completes the checkout or swipes the credit card. Each sale plants the seeds for future sales.
You can segment your customers using purchase history and conduct Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value (RFM) analysis to help you:
- Identify your best customers
- Tailor offers to drive repeat sales
- Reactivate lapsed buyers
You can also use your sales data to perform market basket analysis — identifying the wines and accessories most frequently purchased together — and discover opportunities to create bundles, recommend pairings and design promotions that increase order value.
Insights Beyond the Bottle
If your winery hosts events, operates a bistro or has an onsite B&B, you’re sitting on even more rich data. For example:
- Which menu items and wines are most often ordered together? Use this to suggest pairings.
- Do certain types of events attract different customer profiles? Tailor future events accordingly.
- What wines do B&B guests order during their stay? Offer targeted recommendations for return visits.
And don’t worry if some customers don’t drink wine at all. If you give them a great experience, they’ll tell their friends — many of whom will buy wine.
Start Gathering Insights Now
Your winery already has multiple customer touchpoints brimming with insights. You just need to start tapping into them.
At every tasting, event, meal and transaction, your customers are telling you what they like and how they buy. And they’re paying you to learn this. You don’t need to go big all at once. Start small:
- Ask tasting room patrons for their feedback
- Segment your email list based on purchase behavior
- Listen more closely at your next in-home or virtual tasting
Each small step builds your understanding and your ability to market more effectively. The important thing is simply to start.
Alex Caffarini
Alex Caffarini is the founder and president of CompassDTC, a strategy and analytics consultancy that helps small and midsized food and beverage brands — wineries included — unlock growth through strategic DTC marketing. With over 30 years of experience in marketing research and analytics, Alex has conducted more than 150 market research surveys and led high-impact CRM and direct marketing initiatives for banks, catalog retailers, pharmaceutical companies, and national grocery chains, and has built segmentation models for premium California wineries. He specializes in developing predictive models that identify high-value customers and optimize promotional performance. Reach Alex at alex.caffarini@compassdtc.com.
