February 15 Meeting with Joel Butler

2/15 Meeting with Joel Butler

Background: Stanford Alum, Master of Wine, runs a Wine Consultancy

Notes

Notes:

• General Questions
  • E-commerce – pretty helpful, especially for smaller wineries
  • Other way – a way to keep wholesalers in business
  • Not interested in providing people with a huge amount of support
  • Big wholesalers – really not interested, unless they’ve gotten incredibly strong 3rd party critical reports and reviews
  • Wineries – more and more selling direct
  • Pretty positive way to go for them
  • Most of them are not getting a lot of signal from distributors
  • From retail – heavily restricted in terms of D2C – only about 14 states and DC allow the a retailer to sell to out of state
  • Vinoshipper
  • Bottom line: from an ecommerce point of view, it is probably the future, or is the future, for a lot of larger based wineries
  • In general – it’s a difficult problem b/c of all the restrictions and state governments
• Most sales still getting into restaurants
  • A lot of wines still getting credibility from a good wine list
  • Any winery that sells direct pockets that difference between the price they sell to a distributor or directly to a retailer
  • Selling at 30-35% less than what a retail price would be at a winery
  • If a retail price at a store is $20, that means they are selling to wholesaler to $10
  • Losing money – not the issue if you’re pricing your wine right
  • If you can get a lot of your wine into a market, if it’s expensive ($30-50+) is a better option for many restaurants