SSU Wine Business Institute Faculty Director Damien Wilson sees opportunity and solutions on the horizon.
By Damien Wilson
In 2006, I moved to Angers, a small town in the Loire Valley, with my young family. The move was to begin my first job in an academic field after 20+ years of working in the wine industry. As a dedicated wine lover, I was very happy living in France.
The specific mixture of professional experience and academic rigor soon led to an opportunity to lead a team that was creating a masters program in wine business with the Burgundy School of Business. So, within two years of arriving in France, I had cut my teeth as a teaching-researcher and was taking on the role of an academic program director.
Monitoring SSU From Afar
From the time I took on that role, I began monitoring what was happening at Sonoma State University’s Wine Business Institute (WBI). As a relative novice in French, I was an early adopter of online communications tools, and I made a point of finding and following the digital activities of wine business expertise in California. If there was an article published on wine consumer behavior — or tourism, logistics or label design — there was a better than average chance that it had an SSU faculty member listed as an author.
I watched with keen interest as WBI grew in size and reputation. By 2014, the French program I was managing had grown to a point where it had generated a threefold increase in revenue, while enrollment numbers had doubled over the same time. Those six years of students that I’d successfully attracted, recruited and graduated had come from almost 40 different countries, and not all of those countries were wine producers.
Maintaining that level of interest in the wine business as a career was all-encompassing. I needed a bigger team … or a new challenge. Consequently, when my promising academic career was encouraged to take on an ambitious challenge at Sonoma State, I couldn’t help but be inspired by the opportunity.
The timing was ideal. Even though life in Burgundy was a dream for any wine lover, having been repeatedly confronted by the French aversion to effective marketing practice in their wine businesses, I had finally learned the difference between perseverance and futility. Thus, a chance to join the institution that had the largest concentration of wine business academics was too good an opportunity to pass up. After a lengthy and detailed recruiting process, I was appointed as Sonoma State University’s WBI inaugural Hamel Family Chair in wine business in 2015.
Joining the Team
So I again uprooted my family and moved from the heart of Burgundy to Sonoma’s gateway to Wine Country. The welcome was warm and the energy in the local wine business at that time was palpable. In every direction I looked, it felt like there were wine events every week, as well as endless opportunities to teach, research and write on wine business. I put my hand up for everything and found ample support — as well as offers to partner or contribute on whatever was required to keep WBI and Sonoma State moving in the direction required.
As the years went by, even as SSU’s leadership positions changed, strategies pivoted, and then the pandemic revolutionized the virtual classroom, controversies within the industry began to mount. Despite this mixture of opportunities and roadblocks, the way that faculty just kept at it, breezing through department accreditation reviews, was just one of the ways we kept everyone motivated.
I’ve seen educators win teaching, research, Fullbright and certification funds year-after-year. I’ve stood in the rain with an acre of students, colleagues and staff from SSU and our CSU partners, in solidarity for causes from minorities’ rights, to collective bargaining. So when WBI’s long-serving executive director retired in 2024, I saw the chance to take on the responsibility of directing the program’s future. I’m inspired by what we can do at Sonoma State.
Assuming Leadership
Already, we’re making changes that count. The CSU Chancellery’s actions to match newly directed state government funding (in recognition of the task we’re undertaking here) is just one step in the right direction. The wine industry is facing some of its greatest challenges ever. But together, we’ll discover the solutions by learning from those exercising best practices and building on the knowledge we’re gaining through industry-focused and -supported research.
In retrospect, that life in France may have looked great from the outside, but I much prefer the chance to be a part of the change that leads to the wine industry’s recovery in the coming years. I have faith in the direction that Sonoma State is already taking. Now, let’s make the best of this journey together. Wine for thought.
