The Wine Knows

The Washington Wine Commission's first dip of a toe into a focused consumer-marketing campaign is paying dividends in Florida.

The Seattle-based wine commission announced this week that its three-month, $385,000 marketing blitz in Tampa, Fla., brought in a 45% increase in sales. That's nearly $488,000 in additional revenue.

At first glance, this is a lot of money to spend (out of a $1.5 million budget) to net just $100k. But the wine commission points out that several Washington wineries have new distribution into the market (and probably other parts of Florida), so the short-term costs should equal more long-term gains.

Florida is an important market for the wine business. After New York and California, Florida is one of the most lucrative states for wine sales. In fact, Wine Press Northwest has a lot of subscribers in Florida, so there's a good amount of interest in our region from the opposite corner of the country.

It sounds like the wine commission has plans to return to Tampa for a follow-up campaign next year. I'm not sure how many times the commission can afford to do this kind of blitz around the country, but this isn't a bad experiment.

Let me jump on my soapbox for a moment, however: While it's all well and good that the Washington wine industry is reaching out across the country, it still has a lot of work to do at home. Marketshare in state is only around 20%. This means that for every 10 bottles of wine sold in Washington, just two are made here. Yet excluding the big boys (Ste. Michelle, Crest, Hogue, Covey), most wineries sell a vast majority of their wines at home. Barnard Griffin, for example, sells 80% of its 65,000 cases in state (much of it through the state liquor stores).

If many of the wineries are selling out at home but Washington wineries only have a 20% marketshare, it seems there is room for more vineyards, more wine and more focus on regional sales.