Consider the latest from Wine Business Analytics, which documented a dramatic fall in DTC sales. Perhaps, said the report, so…

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Marian, the founder of Archer Roose, recognised that a new generation is looking for high-quality, transparently-labelled wine in convenient formats. 

The results speak for themselves: by August this year, sales were up 20% to 110,000 9L cases, with distribution in 6,000 outlets. 

You’ll find the interview here. 

Marian Leitner-Waldman, Archer Roose

7 key insights:

1. Cans fly off the shelf

Cans are ideal for contemporary consumers, for whom moderation is increasingly important, because they’re single serve, and they keep the wine fresh.

“The third piece is that aluminium is recyclable everywhere in the United States thanks to Coke and Pepsi,” says Marian. “So you don’t have the problems that you face in glass or even some tetra paks, where it’s not recyclable everywhere. It truly is a more sustainable solution.”

Archer Roose worked with the University of Cornell to improve the quality of the canning — and has made the research available to the entire industry.

2. Beer distributors know how to sell cans

Marian noticed that “consumers were spending a ton of time in more traditional beer accounts. Think about places like taco joints, pizzerias and bowling arcades. There were no wine options there, but there was beer.”

She decided to find a beer distributor. 

“Wine distributors really struggled with the concept, but beer distributors got it from the outset. They understood from the get-go that it was a great on-premise opportunity.”

But, says Marian, she had to teach the beer people to be comfortable speaking about wine. She tells them, “you don’t have to be a sommelier”. Instead, she gets them to encourage their customers to taste test her wines against the competition.

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3. Look at where consumers are congregating

When Marian went to a Taylor Swift concert, she noticed that “there was one outlet in the entire stadium that sold wine and that outlet literally had a line wrapped around the entire stadium — and the wine wasn’t even that good.”

She hypothesised that there were a lot of wine drinkers going to concerts who weren’t being served, and negotiated with the concessionaire to test wine at three concerts.

“I saw a 15% increase in their bottom line. Now, we’re outselling our competitors by five times in a stadium.”

4. Wine and cinemas are the perfect match

Regal Cinemas approached Archer Roose after discovering that people weren’t returning to cinemas because the drinks offerings weren’t as good as they got at home.

“We are seeing double digit velocity on a monthly basis per cinema,” says Marian. “I think it really speaks to the fact that we all learned to drink wine while watching movies while we were at home during the pandemic, and we’re taking that behaviour into these movie theatres. But what’s more, we’re all looking for that communal experience.”

5. Give consumers what they want

As Katerina Axelsson of Tastry told Drinks Insider, the use of benchmarking and competitor analysis has made the big brands more homogenous, meaning American consumers are being offered more of the same, at every turn. Marian agrees.

“Frankly, shopping in the wine aisle, even for somebody who’s pretty knowledgeable about wine, is still pretty frustrating,” she says.

Marian says people have changed, and just as they care more about the quality of food, so they do about wine.

“They want transparency, they want high quality, they want premium products that tell a story — and they want it in a format that makes sense for them.”

As she says, 750ml bottles no longer make sense for “97% of the occasions out there today”, which is why Archer Roose concentrates on bag-in-box, cans and bagnums.

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6. Ingredient labelling is important

People want to know what’s in their wine, partly because people have become more ingredient conscious, and partly because “this is a pretty big investment compared to other alcohol. And they want to know that they’re going to like what they’re going to get.”

7. Breaking through investors’ preconceptions was hard

When Marian approached investors, she was up against people who drink fine wines, who couldn’t imagine drinking wine from a can. 

“There were a few people that really believed in me early on, enough to keep us going. Then JetBlue came on board — and that was a game changer for our company.”

Since then, Constellation has acquired a minority stake, through their Focus on Female Founders initiative.

This is only a fraction of what we covered in our discussion, including a chat about the right and wrong way to get a celebrity involved. Give it a listen!

Another Wine Brand Busting Through

When you’ve finished listening to that one, make sure you listen to Amy Troutmiller’s interview, which I will write up in a future newsletter. Amy is another firecracker entrepreneur, whose brand Really Good Boxed Wine is flying off the shelves.

Like Marian, she’s discovered that what consumers really, really want is high-quality wine in flexible formats. It’s another very positive interview, that should make everybody in wine feel optimistic about the possibilities out there.

Amy Troutmiller, Really Good Boxed Wine

Shameless Self Promotion

Last week I was in Virginia, enjoying the spectacular autumn colours, along with the wine and spirits culture. Around 10 am on Tuesday, my WhatsApp started to light up with congratulations, though I had no idea why.

It turned out that WineBusiness Monthly had named me one of their leaders of 2024. I still can’t believe it, especially as it’s an American list full of heavyweights, and I’m not even American. It’s a long way from my days of skulking around wine tastings in Sydney, scared of being asked questions in case anyone found out how ignorant I was.

Nobody achieves anything on their own, and the only reason that I can still write about wine is because I’ve been helped over many years by so many people. This is really the most generous and wonderful sector to be reporting on. More than that, I truly believe its very existence is a riposte to the soul-sucking exploitation and hustle that characterises modern life. It’s a bunch of people who insist on sitting down at the table and taking the time to enjoy each other’s company. That’s very precious — and worth defending.

I can’t possibly thank everybody who’s given me a hand (I would crash the Substack server) but I can at least say a big thank you to Erin Kirschenmann and Cyril Penn at WineBusiness Monthly, who have been prepared to take a risk on my work. If you value good reporting, please go and subscribe. 

And just to round out the week, I was mentioned in Jancis Robinson’s terrific article on wine and health.

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The man to ask is Justin Noland, VP of Digital Experience at Treasury Americas:

• an acknowledged expert in all things digital;

• Treasury Wine Estates is a multi-national company headquartered in Australia, which has 20+ wine brands including the blockbuster 19 Crimes and ultra-premium Penfolds;

• and now, Justin is a Drinks Insider podcast guest!

This post is about wine, but the insights are useful for digital marketing in general.

Justin Noland, VP of Digital Experiences, Treasury Americas

Here are 7 takeaways from the podcast:

1. Get excited about email

Email isn’t as flashy as augmented reality, nor as colorful as Instagram, but it gets the job done.

“Email is the number one way we still reach consumers today,” says Justin. “Every single day, you’re going into the inbox and you’re checking on an email and seeing what’s there.”

2. A good email strategy needs a system

Justin says Treasury’s digital team has created email pathways with many branches.

“We’ll send you an email and how you interact with that email will somewhat determine the next message you get,” he says. “Did you click through to the website to learn more about that subject? No? Okay, let’s try something else.”

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3. Demographics aren’t always useful

How people behave online is more important than their age.

“I always joke that my mother-in-law and Oprah are roughly the same age demographic, but I imagine their lives are a little bit different, right?”

Instead, Justin thinks about how people want to engage online and then gives them options. If they’re not likely to sign up for an email, they might like a Reddit discussion.

A much-quoted Think With Google paper from 2015 found that “our research shows that marketers who try to reach their audience solely on demographics risk missing more than 70% of potential mobile shoppers. Why? Because demographics don't help us understand what we really need to know—consumer intent—what consumers are looking for in an exact moment or where they are looking to find it.”

4. Mass market brands are getting personal

Brands are now creating custom products specifically for brand aficionados — think sneakers.

Justin says there is a 19 Crimes Infamous Insiders program, “where you can earn points and you can create a custom label that includes your own picture that you can put on the bottle.”

Personalization can be something as simple as offering access to a product before it’s available in-store, so fans can be the first to see it, to offering them special or limited-edition versions that will never hit retail shelves. Justin says that people love getting to something first.

“It just gets people excited and more likely to be picking up a bottle of that favorite brand because we treated them with something new and fun.”

5. Geeks are few and far between

“I’ve learned that the majority of consumers, even within our luxury segments, are not as into the details of wine as we think they are,” says Justin.

Instead, the majority of people see wine “as an additive to whatever experience they are having in their own lives.”

Mostly, people just want to feel confident that they’re buying a good bottle of wine. “I think that people want to know that they’re getting value, that they’re getting something of meaning.”

6. Not all luxury consumers are rich

Justin says that many luxury consumers have the same digital profile as people buying other types of wine. 

“And here’s something we need to think about — something like 40% to 45% of luxury consumers are just not in this upper-middle class, upper class,” bracket. “So if you’re only marketing to somebody making an annual income of $150,000 or more, you’re missing a large volume of the audience.”

Often, people are buying luxury products because they want to celebrate something. “You have to have an aspirational message. That it’s truly an above-and-beyond product.”

7. The wine trade needs better content*

“Content is not just creating beautiful photography that you can post on organic social media, that most people will never see,” says Justin.

Instead, think about how to distribute content across multiple platforms, “so you can start engaging people in the place that they want to be on — they want to learn about you on LinkedIn, on Reddit, or on your website.”

And don’t use AI to create the content, as it will be flat and dull. Use humans to create the content and use AI tools to repurpose and post it.

One simple strategy is to do a limited-series podcast. AI tools can cut the podcast into multiple segments, that can then be distributed across multiple platforms, in both 15-second video clips and text form.

“Engagement should be the number one thought process when it comes to posting anything in an organic way,” he adds.

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Bonus Point: People do weird things for engagement

Justin says there was a recent trend in the influencer community to solicit negative feedback.

He says he watched influencers make spelling mistakes, or deliberately do something annoying or wrong.

“Lots of people would jump into the comments to correct them on their mistake,” he says. “All it did was drive up their engagement and make sure that their other posts were being seen by more people.”

(FC: I was tempted to add lots of spelling mistakes to this post to see if it works, but… once an editor, always an editor. Also, to be clear, he wasn’t suggesting that Treasury does this — it was a fun observation.)

The Big Idea

“You know, the more that we can build on those connections, the more that we can deepen that level of storytelling, and get that storytelling in front of them… I think there’s a lot of opportunity.”

Justin Noland, VP of Digital Experiences, Treasury America

The above are only a few of the insights that came out of a very lively conversation. To hear it, just click here. And don’t forget to rate it 5 stars!