US e-tailer Wine Access aims to connect people with wine through storytelling, inspiring them to click ‘add to cart’ along the way. Roger Morris reports
Does every wine have a backstory waiting to be told? It might be one about the vineyard where it was born or the provenance of the vines that bore the grapes. Perhaps it was the meteorological drama of the vintage in which it was born or the personal background of the winemaking family who gave birth to it.
Whatever a wine’s story, CEO Joe Fisch and his writing staff at American e-tailer Wine Access believe it’s their mission to find that tale and tell it so compellingly that any consumer who browses a wine will be tempted to click ‘add to cart’.
The team writes 500 to 1,000-word pieces of content for each wine from scratch, including its own tasting notes. For example, someone searching for a great Rhône syrah who chooses the category at wineaccess.com may be pulled in by this story’s intro: “Few names stand out in wine like Paul Jaboulet Aîné, the house that rules the Rhône as king of the hill. You can feel it standing by the little chapel overlooking the stepped vines that make Jaboulet’s famed La Chapelle — this is the birthplace of one of the world’s greatest wines. We first sipped the 2016 La Maison Bleue, formerly called Petit Chapelle, on a visit a couple of years ago when the wine was still a baby, still coming into its own. Even then, our noses deep in our glasses, we knew we were experiencing something extraordinary. Now, this wine has absolutely blossomed. And we think it represents one of the world’s greatest values.”
Fisch and his team really know how to transport consumers to the vineyards of the world.
Covid-19 created a perfect storm for online retailers
Wine Access’s model is not to buy and stock a huge inventory of SKUs like other large online retail competitors. Instead, is promptly sells tranches of wine provided by producers, importers and wholesalers, generally at a good price to both Wine Access and the potential buyer. Not surprisingly, during the past year, wineries have had many reasons to put significant lots of wine on the market. Prestige wineries normally selling to restaurants and other on-premise markets suddenly found that channel closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Those that sold wine through tasting rooms had to shut down these facilities or to limit access to them. Other wineries found themselves in a cash crunch and looked upon their vintage libraries as readily available cash cows. But, perhaps most of all, everyone with wine to sell saw an army of consumers stuck at home, eager to buy old favourites as well as find new labels — and wanting them delivered to their front doors ASAP.
This provided a perfect storm for Wine Access, as it did to other online retailers. While Wine Access is privately held and not obligated to provide sales figures, Fisch will discuss rounded-off performance numbers. “During 2020, our business grew by about 75%,” he says as he scrolls through his numbers while chatting on a Zoom call. “Champagne sales were up 600%, even though there were massive shortages of Dom Pérignon. White Burgundy was up 500%, Loire whites were up 200% and Napa cabs were up about 200%. Even though we had what I considered an aggressive buying plan, we still kept running out of stock.”
The Wine Access crew of professional wine tasters, many former restaurant sommeliers, sample about 20,000 different wines each year, but the company chooses “less than 10%” to offer customers, and then “only those that exceed the expectations defined by their price”. All wines come directly from producers with no grey market entries. In previous years, these wines would most likely be offered through Wine Access’s daily email blasts, but the demand of the Covid-19 marketplace forced some adjustments to its model of limited-time offerings.
“For our first 21 years, we were a single-channel online business,” Fisch explains, “but in 2017 we started evolving into an online wine store as well. With the lockdowns, we first had to wrap our heads around what was happening. As people were scrambling to stock up on food and toilet paper, we saw a move by consumers for immediate consumption — they wanted us to ship the same or next day. So it made sense for us to double down on our store business.”
Wine Access began life as an early entry into the online market at a time when selling wine across state lines was a heavily regulated and uncharted business. Its founder, Jim Weinrott, a wine importer in New Jersey, started the business in the Philadelphia suburbs in 1997 as an online portal for consumers to buy wine through a network of wine stores.
But the timing was not good. “The site launched, and the market crashed, and everyone ran,” Weinrott later said. In 2004, his model changed and Wine Access began marketing wines through email pitches to consumers, with the wine being held at the winery until it was shipped to the consumer. The business grew to the point that, in 2015, Wine Access was purchased by its current owners, San Francisco-based Norwest Venture Partners.
When the pandemic came “there was domestically a big increase in wines available that would have been sold previously in the on-premise channel”, Fisch says. As an example, Lisa Barker-Mullen, estate director for Sullivan Vineyards in Napa Valley, needed help in moving a 56-case lot of the winery’s 2014 estate cabernet sauvignon. She submitted the wine to Wine Access’s tasting panel, which approved it. “Wine Access sold more than a pallet of our 2014 cab in just 72 hours — the total allocation,” Barker-Mullen says. “I can’t imagine us hand-selling a pallet in that time.”
Change in consumer profile driven by pandemic demand
For Wine Access, demand generated by the pandemic also provided upgrades in its consumer profile, which had been skewed toward baby boomers, with an average age of around 60, a lucrative but slowly disappearing cohort. “We made big gains among the millennials and Gen Xers,” Fisch says, “and our average consumer age is beginning to drop.”
This age dichotomy was reflected in the firm’s two largest-selling price categories during 2020. “The most dramatic sales were in the highs and the lows,” he says. “Over $300 a bottle sales more than doubled — these were wines destined for on-premise — and bottles less than $25 also doubled.” Even more encouraging, Fisch says: “Repeat purchases during 2020 were 25-26% higher than they were three years ago. And because we are direct-to-consumer (D2C), it’s easy to track customers and what they are buying. We track clicks and page turns.”
Fisch says Wine Access also improved its tools and services during the period, increasing its data analytics “to target the right customers with offers that are relevant to them”. Fisch also grew his staff from 30 to 40 employees. Creative work, he explains, is provided by two separate groups — those who taste and select wines and do the tasting notes and those who write the wine stories. Looking ahead, he doesn’t see a major falloff in business even after the Covid-19 lockdowns have run their course. “They will still be buying from us,” Fisch says confidently. “Even today, people are still coming into the [online] category. They like their wines being vetted by us and being delivered to their doorsteps. Last year was a catalyst that put us 10 years into the future.” Fisch does not expect the invigorated online channel to attract new competitors. “Covid was a natural barrier” for new entry, he says, noting that the complicated three-tier system in the US, as well as state-by-state rules, discourage entrepreneurs. “Wine Access is more stable than we were last May,” Fisch says, “but I’m always pressing my people. I don’t want them to let the momentum slow down.” And will that momentum lead to adding bricks-and-mortar stores, as some online retailers in other businesses have done? “We’re definitely looking for a physical presence at some time,” Fisch says, “but it would only be in certain markets as an enhancement to our current business.”
