“It can be intimidating to walk down that wine aisle,” says Danny Brager, vice president of beverage alcohol for Nielsen, New York. “There are so many items, sometimes it’s difficult to navigate down the aisle because you just see this sea of bottles.”
The wealth of options within the wine category — from different varietals to different labels to different places of origin — can prove daunting for many wine buyers, experts note.
“A lot of times when consumers were not [buying] wine before, it’s because they were overwhelmed,” says Claire Moulin, lead analyst for Chicago-based Euromonitor International. “They said, ‘Oh, I have to have all this knowledge about wine and how to drink it.’”
The typical wine consumer is well-educated, with many drinkers boasting undergraduate and graduate degrees, says Agata Kaczanowska, beverage industry analyst for Santa Monica, Calif.-based IBISWorld. However, many of them also fall into the relatively young millennial age group that lacks years of wine drinking experience, experts note.
“It’s very much about simplifying the offer,” Euromonitor’s Moulin explains. “The thing about the new consumer switching to wine consumption is that they don’t know so much about the different varietals, so they’re not going to go for a specific varietal; they’re more going to look at how the bottle looks [and] what kind of taste is coming with it.” Wine labels that manage to connect with consumers through their easily identifiable image, charity work or simple product offerings better attract sales, adds Jared Koerten, U.S. research analyst at Euromonitor.
For example, Modesto, Calif.-based E. & J. Gallo Winery's Barefoot brand, which is the top-selling table wine brand in the United States according to data from Chicago-based SymphonyIRI Group, has created a simple and easily identifiable label featuring a solitary footprint as its logo, Euromonitor’s Koerten notes. The label color changes based on varietal, and specialty stickers on each bottle call attention to the awards each varietal has won, showing consumers that this is a brand that others enjoy, he says. Plus, the Modesto, Calif.-based brand’s involvement in charitable causes, such as its Walk for a Cause initiative supporting local causes and its Beach Rescue Project to clean up beaches to make it safer for beachgoers to walk barefoot in the sand, gives consumers another reason to connect with the brand, he adds.
Skinnygirl wines, products of Deerfield, Ill.-based Beam Inc., also have resonated with consumers because they boil the wine selection process down to three basic choices: California Red Blend, California White Blend or California Rosé blend, Euromonitor’s Moulin says.
For the wine shopper, it might take a little bit more than good branding to identify the perfect wine, Nielsen’s Brager says. “Distinguishing yourself is sort of a combination of what the supplier can do to make the wine stand out and also how they’re going to partner with retailers or what retailers are going to do to make it easier for the consumer to shop the category,” he says. Retailers need to think about how to best arrange the many wine options in a store and include signage to help shoppers find what they want, he notes. “[The wine] needs to find the consumer, not the other way around,” he adds. Brager suggests including a “What’s New” section in the wine department to help shoppers identify some of the newest offerings in the category and encourage trial.
After its 18th consecutive year of growth in 2012, according to data from Chicago-based Mintel, the wine category has shown that it can weather the rough economy and innovate to find new opportunities for growth, experts say.