And this kind of sudden consumer impact leaves marketers almost awestruck.
"There's two things you know about that," Gillespie said. "You can't create it or buy it. And neither can you stop it."
(Fox Searchlight Pictures Via AP)
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A Different Business
Domestic winemakers sold about $23 billion worth of wine last year. But it is a fragmented business: Of the 4,500 wineries in the country, the top 30 account for more than 90 percent of the wine sold, by volume, said Cyril Penn, editor of the trade publication Wine Business Monthly.
That makes it tough to finance traditional national ad campaigns aimed at boosting wine's image and consumption. Some of the bigger wineries have successfully advertised their own brands, such as Woodbridge, but few spend much money on marketing, for themselves or the good of the whole industry.
Last year, according to estimates by the market research firm Adams Beverage Group, total advertising expenditures for wine amounted to only $108 million. The beer industry, by contrast, had retail sales of $82 billion, nearly four times the sales of wine, yet spent more than 10 times more on advertising. The spirits business, Adams Beverage estimates, had about double the retail sales of wine last year and spent four times more on marketing.
That's because even the biggest wineries aren't that big compared with Fortune 500 behemoths, so they don't have massive marketing budgets. And the thousands of smaller wineries have even less to spend.
In a way, though, the wine industry did what it really needed to do: shun traditional advertising in favor of making wines that were more appealing to more people.
"There's been an incredible evolution of wine marketing from the point of view of packaging, labeling, design, different sizes, positioning of wine that has had a very positive effect on the market," said Gillespie of the Wine Market Council.
Walking through the wine section of any supermarket is a much more visual experience than it used to be, with a plethora of memorable and punny names, such as Love My Goat, Little Penguin and Jest Red.
It's been equally beneficial to the wine industry that a surplus of grapes, the result of overplanting in the 1990s, has yielded huge quantities of high-quality bulk wine that vintners can afford to play around with and sell at an affordable price.
