How the wine industry has really changed during the pandemic

Nice to hear from you again - welcome back. So what’s been going on then for the last couple of years? Why, thank you. Yes, it’s been a bit lively hasn’t it and we’ve had to batten down the hatches somewhat. But hopefully we’re all ready to bounce back even stronger, and certainly wiser than before the March 20, 2020 lockdown and the long months that have followed. So what has changed then in the world of drinks, wine and spirits in the last two years of the pandemic? You don’t start with the easy questions do you? In a nutshell. Everything and nothing. Everything in the sense that each and every one us are different people and businesses to what we were doing before the pandemic. You can’t have lived through the last couple of years and not changed your behaviour and ways of living and working. Any successful wine business today will be different to how it operated in the first quarter of 2020. If it isn’t, it’s probably on borrowed time.

Then how can you say nothing has changed? Well, that’s just trying to be clever. But by that I mean the raison d’être of the wine industry has not changed. We are all tasked with making, distributing, marketing and selling wines that people want to drink. Those dynamics have not changed. It’s just how we go about doing it that has been ripped up and torn into small pieces. Go on then, what have been the biggest changes? The biggest change has been the enormous switch to online retailing and the subsequent need for all aspects of the wine industry to turn to digital support and technology to grow, never mind survive. That’s now so much a given it feels a bit like cliché saying it. The big challenge for the new wine industry is just how far you have gone in turning your business digital. For many it meant launching an e-commerce website for the first time, but what else have you done to support and promote it? Going into the pandemic you would be hard pushed to find many digital experts in any of the major wine distributors, importers and brand owners (See On The Grapevine). Coming out of Covid, the numbers of digital marketing roles might be increasing, but how many are being filled with the best digital talent there is? How many wine companies are still putting WSET training skills ahead of knowing exactly how pay per click and paid search digital marketing campaigns actually work?

Ah good to see you are all fired up again? But surely you still need to have the basic wine skills and knowledge to work in wine however much you think it has changed? That’s the problem. You’re still thinking like March 2020. Do you think Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Nike or L’Oréal expect any top digital talent they hire to know about how food is made, how the health and beauty sector works, or how you make a pair of posh trainers? Yet the wine industry still puts wine knowledge and education as a pre-requisite for getting a job. No wonder it is still full of the same white middle class folk from similar schools and universities, however much the talk of diversity and inclusion has been ramped up during lockdown. OK, let’s move to calmer waters what else has changed? The rules of engagement have also been ripped up over the last two years and those who work in the middle - the importers, the suppliers, the distributors - have got two very different beasts to keep happy. Their producers and their retail and on-trade customers. Neither end of the supply chain is ready and willing to go back to how things were before March 2020.