We can’t be everything to everyone, at every price point. I think a lot of wine businesses are not making just one or two too many wines, they’re making four to eight too many wines. David LeMire MW reports.
I’m a sucker for wine business content, especially sales and marketing content. Maybe it’s just that the algorithm has worked this out, but there seems to be more to read and listen to than ever… which is brilliant as it helps me procrastinate rather than creating my own content, while convincing me that I’m becoming better informed.
Happily, there is almost as much decent stuff as there is drivel. The best I’ve consumed lately is the podcast by Thomas Massey interviewing Mark Ritson. Search Through the Cellar Door Ritson to find it.
Ritson was a marketing professor for many years, and then founded a course called MiniMBA, teaching marketing mainly to people who are already doing marketing but want a better foundation and understanding of the science of marketing. He is also a very keen wine consumer, and he’s worked for LVMH and Treasury, so he is uniquely well placed to talk about marketing in the wine industry.
Here are Ritson’s most salient points and my take on them:
Marketing is a 100-year-old discipline – anyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well
Ritson’s point is that there is a lot to learn and there are laws of marketing that are worth understanding. Formal marketing training is valuable and often underrated in the wine business.
Ritson touches on the advantages that larger brands have in the effectiveness of their marketing spend, what smaller wineries can do to compete, and why discounting, especially to our direct customers, is to be avoided.
Don’t make too many different wines
Nearly all of us make too many wines. The only way to be completely sure that we’re not making too many wines is to only make one wine, and even that is probably one too many in some cases.
When we make too many wines, we dilute our attention, our spend, our energy and our focus. We confuse our customers and stretch our distributors. We can’t be everything to everyone, at every price point.
I think a lot of wine businesses are not making just one or two too many wines, they’re making four to eight too many wines.
The wine business is one of the toughest to succeed in
There are thousands of wine brands, depending on where you are in the world, competing to fit into only a dozen or so different channels. Retailers often have enormous power over their suppliers because of the limited routes to market.
Ritson relates a story about working with a famous brand and going to meet Costco, where the Costco buyers pointed out that Costco accounted for about 30 percent of the brand’s distribution in the USA, but the brand only accounted for 0.02 percent of Costco’s sales.
Wine is also a mature market, where brands have become established over hundreds of years. The limited routes to market and the maturity of the market make it incredibly hard to get penetration for a new brand.
The better alternative, which is the LVMH model, could be to buy an existing, established brand that needs a little love to shine again.
Strategy is what you don’t do
Blink and you miss this comment in the podcast, but it’s a great one to reflect on. We all have limited time, resources, and cash. Everything we do is at the expense of doing something else, i.e. the opportunity cost.
In Ritson’s case it was staying out of the USA with his MiniMBA until recently.
It could be that for us – choosing which markets we enter, or it could be channel, varieties, staffing, events, all manner of things. Being ruthless about saying no to things is the superpower we need.
Celebrities are a proven way to build a brand
We sometimes look at celebrity wines with some cynicism in terms of the integrity of the project, but they can work, it’s a completely valid way to build a brand, and particularly in a mature market like wine, it is one of the few ways to get cut-through in a relatively short amount of time.
If we don’t have a celebrity on board, how are we going to make an impact and build brand equity?
People want to hear from winemakers
I feel like we know this instinctively, but it often gets forgotten, or in the cut and thrust of busy schedules gets ignored. Consumers want to hear from the winemakers, not the marketers, the business managers, etc.
It’s like promos for movies – it’s the actors that do the promos, not the studio’s marketing executives. Our winemakers (and our viticulturists in the right places) are weapons that sometimes we don’t use enough.
David LeMire MW is joint CEO of Shaw + Smith and co-owner of MADD Vineyard. He writes a regular column for WBM – Australia’s Wine Business Magazine and this article was first published in the September-October 2025 edition.