Another relatively slow news day, so I thought I would start by talking about why I am writing this blog. A friend asked me the best question yesterday — she said, why are you writing this blog? Are there other blogs like it? How is it different? I love this type of direct question.
So to answer those questions — honestly, I am writing this blog to document my thoughts for people who might want to get a new perspective on wine news. I follow lots of blogs and get many newsletters related to wine, plus I have a Twitter feed filled with interesting personalities from wine. There are digests with links to lots of stories and a couple of good newsletters that do interviews/get “breaking stories” — notably Shanken News Daily and Wine & Spirits Daily. But as I sift through the various sources of wine news, I wanted one that called out the stories that spoke to me. And my goal is to call out those stories while also calling out why they matter.
For today, just a few stories:
Drizly is expanding its drinks delivery service to Baltimore. This isn’t that big of a deal as a stand-alone story but it is worth watching all of these businesses — Drizly, Lasso, Minibar, Booze Carriage, Swill — they are expanding rapidly and eventually there will be a shake-out. I don’t have any inside information but I would be interested in hearing about their long-term game plans. Are they planning to differentiate with superior superior service with their own fleets? Or will all of these virtual armies of drivers (Uber, Lyft, Postmates, SpoonRocket, Drizly, etc) use the same drivers and compete on some other plane?
At Unified, there was a session focused on the confusing array of regulations related to direct-to-consumer wine businesses. I didn’t attend the session but it sounds like a bunch of highly knowledgeable people reminding the attendees that the wine industry is backwards and you have to watch your back at all times. If you are wine supplier, you need to make a decision — are you going to follow the letter of the law or hope the TTB doesn’t catch you. While it is hard to feign innocence about shipping laws, the laws about usage of social media don’t make much sense. What to watch for: will the TTB update their regulations to add some common sense?
This may be personally more relevant but it is an interesting development — Dominio del Plata, one of larger wineries in Argentina focused on $10+ wines, has changed national importers. Dominio del Plata‘s brands – Crios, BenMarco, Susana Balbo – account for over 100,000 cases sold in the USA. Big changes like this don’t happen frequently because they are tumultuous for the brands. It would be interesting to see the data to determine if changes like this lead to long-term growth. When you change importers, you also change distribution networks. Most likely, the winery will lose significant sales in the first year because the existing distributors will replace their current placements of the wines with other wines they offer and it takes a little while for the new distributor to train its sales team and distributor sales teams. That said, Dominio del Plata and Folio must believe Folio’s distribution network is a better fit long-term and Dominio del Plata’s brands will benefit from being the only Argentine brands in the Folio portfolio. Note: I worked for Vine Connections, Dominio del Plata’s prior importer.
Digesting the wine news of the day 