If wineries want to boost their business and attract younger, tech-savvy new consumers, they need to more vigorously utilize social media and digital platforms and offer more wines at lower price points, according to a survey of the 2015 American wine consumer conducted by the Wine Business Institute of Sonoma State University’s School of Business and Economics.
Not surprisingly, Facebook is the Big Dog of social media, with 84 percent of survey participants reporting using it. Next came YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, with a paltry 6 percent of those surveyed saying a pox on all your filthy social media. Despite those philistines, 54 percent of respondents use social media to get wine information, with almost as many using it to get wine recommendations from friends, look up wine prices and discuss wine in general.
Forty-three percent of those surveyed use their smartphone to look up wine prices, while a quarter of them use smartphone apps to get wine information.
Also not surprisingly, wine drinkers are still price conscious, with a third of those surveyed saying their sweet spot for at-home consumption being between $10 and $15 a bottle. The remaining respondents are pretty evenly split between lower-priced wines and higher.
At restaurants, almost a quarter of respondents purchase wines from $26 to $35 a bottle, though a third report only buying wines by the glass or (horrors!) not buying wine at all. So far, at least consumers are shying away from those ever-escalating by-the-glass prices, with more than half saying their per glass purchases range from $7 to $10. Only 5 percent report paying more than $15 for a glass of wine, which should give restaurateurs who always seem to be raising their by-the-glass prices at least a moment’s pause.