vintuba.com

It’s funny, you work for a winery and everyone imagines that you’re either literally making the wine or in charge of shaking hands with the public every single day. People who try to sell me advertising space, distributor trade reps, the guy who delivers the bottled water, my mother – all betray themselves in conversation as having absolutely no idea what I do all day. “Well you must be insanely busy now that harvest is on.” -anonymous sales person “True, I haven’t returned your unsolicited phone call, but its because I am authoring a wine club customer feedback survey, not because there is a whole bunch of Sauvignon Blanc being delivered today.” – a perhaps overly sassy Me.

Commodity is not wine’s natural state. In fact, sometimes I don’t know how we (as in the wine industry) managed to get here from there. How we took something so inherently different and made it so the same. How in our mad-dash to lay a business plan and margin analysis over a vineyard, we overlooked what gives wine value in the first place. Forgot what makes it mysterious. Ignored what makes it special.

I’ve got some opinions regarding the secret password of the modern wine industry. No not Social Media – Millennials. Hell, I am one. As someone in the trade, who both is young and looks younger, I’m pretty weary of being the spokesperson for this “future of the industry.” Here are the multitude of reasons why: