With ~2M monthly sessions on their newly unified commerce and media website, Wine Enthusiast continues to be a beacon for the wine industry. Jacki Strum, President of Wine Enthusiast Media, details their new wine review platform and global wine travel directory, democratizing access to wine and wine experiences globally. These initiatives help bring more people into the world of wine, including the younger generations, a critical part of building a vibrant wine industry.

Detailed Show Notes:

Covid altered the business model, led to re-structured organization and unified media and commerce divisions on wineenthusiast.com

2022 - WE paused reviews for emerging wine regions to recalibrate systems

Existing tasting process

• 1 of 2 publications that review every wine blind (high cost), taste in flights w/in region and price brackets
• Need to store, archive, organize wines, set up tastings (in paper bags with numbers), and hire reviewers
• 50% of reviews are done at HQ (imported wines), and West Coast wines are done locally
• The manual process of filling out a pdf and putting that into the box with wines, manually inputted into J Guide (legacy system, 20 years old), then stored and organized for tasting

New tasting platform (Sept 2024) - anyone can submit a wine for review and all will be reviewed

• New digital platform - bar code scanners, printed tabs, can track shipments and deliveries, a more fluid database
• Reduces large volume of questions from people submitting wine (can track digitally)
• It has the same # of reviewers, but a more flexible infrastructure can allow for more wines to be tasted
• $65/SKU processing fee - all reviewers charge in some way (e.g., require subscription, membership, or advertisement)
• 6-month processing time (same as before) - hope to reduce this over time, based on the schedule of reviewers
• Printed reviews selected by the tasting dept, all scores published online for free

Tasting platform benefits for new and small wineries

• Opens up reviews to all regions across the globe
• The US market is still heavily score-driven for distribution (some major retailers, e.g., Costco, Kroger, Albertsons, require scores from major publications)
• Helps with tasting room and local distribution sales

Media trends

• Print is still doing well (e.g., books outsold movie tickets last year), and magazine subscriptions are increasing (free tote bags help)
• Advertising up slightly
• Digital media is growing, with a targeted advertising focus
• Events - biggest growth area - launched Sip of South America, Sip of Italy, and biggest event is Wine Star Awards (25th Anniversary in SF this year)
• TikTok now allows alcohol advertising, getting Gen Z engaged with wine knowledge

New travel division for WE

• Tasting room directory, partnered w/ Tock - 1st agnostic travel global wine travel guide
• Leverages Tock’s wineries as launching list (~1,200 wineries, CA focused), building out globally with WE relationships (~100 wineries reached out in 1st month to be included)
• The 2nd most trafficked page on the site

WE revenue mix

• Covid - led to explosive commerce growth
• Today - back to 2019 levels, ~80% commerce / ~20% media

Getting Gen Z engaged with wine

• Print enables content absorption without ad bombardment (e.g., book reading bars in NYC)
• Need to change content for each channel to target audience (e.g., Google as people’s “secret diary,” article on how to hold a wine glass became a top 5 article)
• Influencers, infographics, video - bring in new consumers (e.g., wine & potato chip parking article led to major influencer doing every pairing on TikTok)

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