By now, I hope many of you have seen the nice articles on Israeli wine and food in June's Wine Spectator. I'll have more to say about that with links to wines mentioned there you can actually buy from us, over the weekend.

One of the things Dr. Yair Margalit was quoted as saying in the article was that, "the future is in the small wineries."

And my question (with a lot of self-interest of course!) and I have thought about this one enough to have my biases in place is….WHAT is the proper marketing plan for wines from small wineries, whether they are Israeli wines or not?

If you caught my sort of fired-up YouTube video post earlier this week you may know my answer to this question.

First of all, in any business start-up I believe NICHE is the only way to go.

Niche + Community Development is THE marketing plan.

(Gary Vaynerchuk spoke about this at yesterday's TECH Cocktail event)

I don't think traditional distribution makes much sense for premium small production brands like the ones we're marketing from Israel.

As a general rule DIRECT TO CONSUMER and DIRECT TO TRADE are the right channels for these fine wines.

In fact, a major Napa producer wrote this in response to a note from me asking about his preferred distributors in key states:

Hi Richard,

I love your request.  With all due respect, there is no such animal as a distributor that I like.  They are a necessary tool but as a small brand fighting for shelfspace, the job is best done by yourself and not by a distributor who is naturally beholden to much larger interests.  Sorry to bear this news but self distribution via the internet is the means to survival and success in the new age.

Hope my message is not too direct to digest.

talk soon,

xxxx

This is not a small production winemaker – you'd know his name, you've drunk his wines.

What an unbelievable message from a winemaker who, given his size and scale, needs to work with distributors all across this country and beyond.

Mostly since I believe that small production wines are a labor of love by the winemakers and their families and unless the person on the receiving end of the wines is feeling the love (i.e., the of intermediaries is either ZERO or something close to zero), no one will give a damn about these dreams-in-a-bottle.

So your marketing plan for these Israeli wines has to answer the question (get ready for this)……

How do we market someone else's love affair? How do we market someone else's Dream? How do we then monetize Passion + Love in the marketplace?

Because these wines are the Dreams and Love Affairs from these winemakers and their families. And that's what we're selling.

There's just not enough juice from most of these small wineries from Israel for a major wholesaler to care – and as the number of wholesalers thankfully shrinks they'll even have less attention span for small production wines, don't you think? I've said before that commercial wineries SPILL more wine than these boutiques produce.

What's a guy to do?

create on-line substantove CONTENT about wine from Israel that's not "salesy" (stay tuned!)

and

create live experiences for more and more people to:

1) TASTE THE WINES

2) EASILY PURCHASE THE WINES

3) SHARE WINES AND WINE FEEDBACK WITH OTHERS

4) MAKE PEOPLE FEEL SOMEHOW A PART OF THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE MAKING THESE GREAT WINES IN ISRAEL

5) FIND WAYS FOR CUSTOMERS TO CO-CREATE CONTENT AND EVEN PRODUCTS (stay tuned for some cool stuff in this area)

6) TALK ABOUT LOVE AND DREAMS

What else?