October 14, 2026 (Houston, TX) — Amy C. Gross, who has worked in artificial intelligence and wine since 2011, has released the Holiday Wine Sales Playbook, a free guide that helps winery teams plan their holiday sales season and get useful first drafts from AI, in their own voice.
The holiday season asks a lot of small winery teams, and many are now turning to AI tools for help. AI adoption is growing across the U.S. wine industry, but unevenly, according to the Wine Market Council’s latest AI in the U.S. Wine Industry Survey, conducted with WineBusiness Analytics. The Playbook is written for the owners, tasting room teams, and marketers who have tried AI and gotten copy that could have come from any winery.
The Playbook asks ten questions in two parts. Part One captures how a winery sounds: the words regular guests use to describe it, how the best tasting room host greets someone, the words the winery would never use, and one real email or note that sounds exactly like the winery. Part Two captures the season: the feeling guests should have, a story or tradition that belongs in the holiday message, featured wines and the holiday moments they fit, exact offers, prices and ship-by dates, the audiences being reached, and how the team will know the season worked.
The answers become a one-page Voice Brief that teams save in Claude or ChatGPT. Every draft then starts from the winery’s real wines, prices, dates, and stories. A free Winery Voice Brief Builder, included with the Playbook, turns the ten answers into a finished brief and a starter prompt.
“Most generic AI copy isn’t a writing problem. It’s a missing-information problem,” said Gross. “AI is only as good as the information you give it. Your best holiday messages are already in your head, and your team already knows what makes your winery special. The Playbook gets that onto the page in about 20 minutes, so every first draft sounds like you.”
The Holiday Wine Sales Playbook is free. Download it at amycgross.com/playbook.
About Amy C. Gross
Amy C. Gross helps wine professionals find and use the AI tools that save time and sell more wine, through keynotes, association workshops, and Pairings, her free newsletter. She has worked in AI since 2011, when she founded VineSleuth, an AI-powered wine recommendation engine grounded in sensory science. From 2014 to 2019, she collaborated with IBM on AI projects and trained IBM retail sales teams across the U.S. and Europe to use AI in their daily work. She was named one of Re-Work’s Top 30 Women Advancing AI in Texas and has spoken at Vinitaly, wine2wine, VinExpo, SXSW, NRF: Retail’s Big Show, and Mobile World Congress. Gross is Immediate Past National President of Women For WineSense and Vice Chairman for Entries of the Rodeo Uncorked! International Wine Competition, and has judged wine for more than a decade at Rodeo Uncorked!, Vinitaly’s 5 Star Wines, and the California State Fair. Learn more at amycgross.com.
