Winery PR 101

Wines & Vines, May, 2002 by Anne Louise Bannon

If you think your wine would be totally lost among the hundreds of bottles lining the shelves at any given supermarket, imagine trying to stand out in a media market so overcrowded even the big guys have trouble being heard.

Especially when you've got a promotions budget that's less than the cost of capsules to cover a single case of bottles, you're being pulled in five different directions at once and every day is planned down to the second, with additional requests for your attention coming in by the barrelful.

The problem is, if you want your winery to grow, you're going to have to spend some time letting the rest of the world know that you're in business. The days of making a darned fine bottle of wine and letting the world find you are long gone, if, indeed, they ever existed.

Marketing your winery encompasses a whole range of activities, from the most basic elements of label design to the floor plan of your tasting room to how, when and if you advertise. And a major part of your overall strategy should include a hefty dose of public relations (PR).

PR is not just damage control when something bad happens; it's an essential marketing activity, especially since traditional advertising, for most small to medium-sized wineries, has fairly limited effectiveness.

But what is PR?

"Public relations is the nonpaid part of marketing," said Lisa Donoughe, owner of LAD Communications in Portland, Ore. "It's a way to get your message out to your public."

PR is basically the different things you do to get attention, including going to festivals, putting Out a newsletter, writing press releases for the different media, spending time getting to know your distributors, even making sure your staff knows what's going on with the company.

The key is non paid. In other words, you're not paying for airtime or print or Internet space to say why your wine is wonderful. That's advertising. What good PR does is set it up so that other, unbiased people are saying nice things about you because they really think you've got something to offer. Yes, there are still costs attached. That newsletter may be free for the recipients, but you'll have to cough up a few shekels to get it to them. But the people who get your newsletter can share it with their friends or buy that extra case for their party. Either way, someone else is saying, "Hey, there's this great little winery..." and that's a powerful way to sell.

Since PR covers a fairly wide range of activities, you need to start with a strategy.

"The key to promotion is to be able to send a message and to communicate it directly to a target," Veronica Barclay of Barclay and Company, a St. Helena, Calif., marketing firm, said. "You have to know who you're doing it for or you're buying every bottle for yourself."

Of course, knowing who you are and what style fits you best helps. And you may have to spend some real time thinking these things over if you haven't already. Both Donoughe and Barclay said that they spend a certain amount of time with their clients just working that out. But you can't leave it there, they said. You have to find something that makes you stand out from all the other wineries.

"Maybe your family has been growing winegrapes for generations," said Donoughe, who includes several wineries among her clients. "Try to extract something that will make you interesting to write about."

Granted, that's not easy to do. What seems interesting and different to you may not be to the rest of the world. And what is really interesting to the rest of the world may be something you barely even think about. Which is why, even if you're very small and/or relatively new on the scene, you may want to scrape the money together to buy a couple hours of time with a professional publicist. Rates will vary, but a good publicist can help you pull together all the different elements that make you and your wine special and help point you toward the right outlets for getting your story told.

Once you've got yourself figured out, Donoughe said that the first step is to put together an information or press packet. Press packets come in varying degrees of fanciness, but a nice folder with a brief history of your winery, what makes it special--essentially your story--a list of releases and some photographs is acceptable. In fact, depending on the journalist (for example, this one), too much glitz and foofarall can be a turn-off.

Keep a stack of these available to hand out to festival planners, restaurant owners, retailers, distributors and journalists. These are not for the general public but for the people who will help you reach the general public.

The next thing you need to do is research. You should be reading the popular wine press, as well as food columns--food and wine pairing is particularly hot right now. Read your local newspaper and maybe a national business publication. Sometimes even the sports section might trigger an idea.

Ronnie Tierney, a publicist with Huffman Communications, said that you need to know what's going on in your local area.