Getting Some Good Ink!
A case study in selling our Eclipse Malbec the new old-fashioned way.
Marketing is like a first date. If you only talk about yourself, there won’t be a second one. –David Beebe
The first time I heard that old winemaking platitude—How do you make a million dollars in the wine industry? Answer: Start with two million!—I was deeply offended. I couldn’t imagine a more soul-depleting point of view, especially as I was just starting off on my own winemaking journey. But even now, over six years later, I would guess that at least half of the people I meet in wine country tell me that “joke” when they hear that I’m a winemaker. I’m not kidding. And they do so with such enthusiasm and aplomb, thinking for some unimaginable reason that I’ve never heard it before. I just want to pop ‘em one!
But I suppose there’s some truth in the banality. Selling anything is hard. It reminds me of an employee I once had when I launched an environmental magazine. I hired her as advertising director and her job was to create an ad sales department and, well… sell ads. At first, she was fantastic, seemed to know everything we needed to get started, from fancy rate cards and media kits to databases of prospective customers, and all the ad-speak you could imagine. But when we were finally ready to get out there and start selling, she failed miserably. She would polish up all the weapons until they gleamed, and she could certainly get the troops pumped up, but she could never actually jump into the fray. The idea of making a pitch, of actually asking the ask, seemed to paralyze her. I think the possibility of failure overshadowed the importance and sheer worthiness of what we had to sell.
Wine is like that. It can scare the hell out of you.
You spend thousands of hours, and thousands of dollars in the stewardship of something akin to a wild child. You pray that you don’t make any drastic mistakes—this requires common sense, as well as physical senses, and godforsaken chemistry and higher math— and you hope you can fix it if the wine decides to act out.
Despite that trepidation, you marvel in a slightly deranged way at the miracle that sometimes happens in the barrel and in the bottle when you allow time and temperature, and the hardest thing of all—patience—to conduct the symphony that is your wine. The result is a product that you are quick to take credit for when in the end the audience yells “bravo!”
But it is a product, and it is for sale, and it must be sold ‘cause you need your money back if you want to do it again. And you want to do it again ‘cause it’s rare and intoxicating to be involved in real magic.
And so you need a story, a spiel, something you can pitch to protective buyers to get them interested. You need a marketing campaign!
But marketing is expensive and as much as I want to think big, I have to contend with the fact that the Tiny Vineyards Wine Company is a very, very micro-winery with only one employee, me. I’m the only manpower, and I’m working with a marketing budget which is also very, very micro.
The following is a brief case study of a marketing campaign we’re currently employing to sell our Eclipse Malbec.
When the moon punches a hole in the sky
Wine has long been used to commemorate major celestial events, going all the way back to the oldest recorded total solar eclipse in human history roughly 5,000 years ago. Back then, wine may have been used as much to numb the populace from fear that the world was about to end, as it was to appease the obviously unhappy heavenly powers.
Now, with modern scientific understanding supplanting the ire of the ancient gods, we are no longer as quick to panic—as those early stargazers likely did—over the appearance of comets, eclipses, meteor showers or northern lights.
But that doesn’t mean a little salute to those solar deities of mythology isn’t a wise move! And a bottle of Eclipse Malbec is a fantastic souvenir of the event.
As a passionate eclipse chaser, myself, I experienced how enthusiastic people were for wines made for the “Great American Eclipse” in 2017, particularly in Oregon, and the 2019 eclipse in Argentina and Chile. So, two-and-a-half years ago I decided to make a commemorative “Eclipse Malbec” for the upcoming eclipse this April 8th.
As it turned out the winemaking was the easy part. The bigger challenge was being able to target individuals who were passionate enough about both total solar eclipses and fine wine to want to purchase a $40 commemorative bottle.
So, to begin with, I labeled that bottle using a striking time-lapse image of the 2019 total solar eclipse I shot over the Andes Mountains in Argentina. Then, as the energy and awareness of the April 8th eclipse began to grow, I superimposed a bottle shot of my wine over a larger version of that time-lapse image, and I turned that into different size ads which I placed on eclipse-themed websites, and cajoled everyone I knew to share on their social media.
This actually worked pretty well for a while until those eclipse websites started to run ads for every eclipse product you could imagine—safety glasses, t-shirts, books, guides, tours, hotels, etc. Eclipse merch was cloggin’ the digital market space.
As eclipse-fever spread across the country I decided that our biggest market was likely the populace that lived in or nearby the path of totality. So, in classic low-cost, grassroots marketing I built a list of every town in the 15 states that the eclipse will be passing over, and I identified every hometown newspaper still being published in print or online in those towns. Then I sent them an old-school press release with lots of great photos and even a pre-written story if they didn't want to do the work of writing their own.
I appended that package with a personalized letter to the editor of each publication recognizing the dilemma they must be having trying to come up with new and original eclipse stories to satisfy the intensifying interest of their readership, who soon would be experiencing the event in their very own backyards. I then humbly offered my Eclipse Malbec story, free, complete with photos, to use however they saw fit.
And it worked.
Newspapers all along the eclipse path are contacting me and picking up the story. See samples just below. And every time it gets printed, I sell some wine! This, in turn, has already led to some larger media, including a nice story in Forbes Magazine. It also caught the eye of the Director of Astronomy at the famed University of Colorado Observatory, who is leading a group of 600 star-gazers to Texas to witness the eclipse. He promoted our wine to his group as the perfect souvenir for the event, and I sold some more wine!
Send wine to someone you know in the path of the eclipse!
I really want to sell out the total 78 cases of Eclipse Malbec I made. Obviously, the internet exposure and the newspaper articles are going to go a long way toward reaching that goal, but here’s an idea that can make us both heroes.
It’s estimated that over 32 million people in the US live in the path of totality for this upcoming April 8th eclipse, and another 150 million live with 200 miles of the path. (Click here for details.) There’s a pretty good chance you know someone in that group, or someone who is traveling to the event from even further away. Imagine how excited and appreciative they would be if you sent them a few bottles of our Eclipse Malbec! There’s still plenty of time to get it shipped, just visit tinyvineyards.com right now and make it happen. It’s gotta be one of the coolest, and tastiest, surprise gifts you will ever give!
Eclipse Malbec—the perfect beverage to toast the extremely beautiful but admittedly alarming spectacle of the moon turning day into night, and then hopefully back into day again!
I enjoyed a bottle of your Eclipse Malbec three days ago! Hope you and Deb are well.