Today Yesterday Jim Lapsley presented some recently aquired aggregate (and anonymous) data on small privately held wineries. The accounting data summarized in the slides to the right shows that, on average, 10-20K case wineries seem to offer the best combination of size and profit margin. The data, gleaned from P&L’s supplied to Silicon Bank from [...]

My son finally arrived yesterday morning, which means that the OIV series will have to be put temporarily on hold. I do expect to make tomorrow’s talks on Winery Costs and Profitability, so check back then for info on building and financing inventory, size distribution and market niche and their affect on profitability, financing premium [...]

Note: Yesterday was replete with big box retailer talk, information on category management, and other trends in supermarket retailing. While it was interesting to see the world through the supermarket retailer’s eyes, it just cemented in my mind that a luxury low volume producer has no business even contemplating developing relationships with them. Our price [...]

National distributors and small premium producers don’t mix. Due to consolidation in the market, even if you do actually get a national wholesaler to take on your brand for the amazingly low price of around half of your per bottle revenue, you’ll still have to incent the heck out of the distributor for your product [...]

The positioning of ultra premiums, luxury wines, cult wines, unobtainables – whatever you want to call them – was the focus of Hanzell Vineyards National Sales Manager Armen Khachaturian today. His was an interesting talk because of all the presenters so far, his advice on brand positioning and tactics were greeted with the most outright [...]