Marketing for wine and viticulture
A bottle sold at your cellar door or to a club member keeps the margin that the same bottle gives away through a distributor.
Where the money moves.
Direct is where the margin lives, and members are the only part of the book you can forecast. That makes retention the number worth managing, not acquisition. A member who lapses after two allocations costs more than the tasting fee ever returned, and the lapse happens quietly, between releases, when the only contact from the winery is a transactional email about a shipment. We build the year around keeping people enrolled, then use acquisition to replace what natural churn takes rather than to disguise it.
Alcohol marketing in Australia runs inside real constraints. The ABAC code, age gating on Meta and Google, verification at delivery, and rules about who can appear in creative and what alcohol can be shown alongside. Work built without those rules gets rejected, reworked and shipped late, usually in the week of a release. We write to the code at concept stage, pre-vet where it is warranted, and keep the gates and audience settings correct so a release campaign does not spend its first two days in review.
The vintage sets the rhythm and nothing shifts it. Harvest, blending, then a release calendar fixed a year out, with allocation days for members and museum stock held back. Cellar door sits inside a different contest again, for a weekend rather than for a wine, against every other reason a Sydney family might drive to the Hunter or a Melbourne couple might spend Saturday on the Mornington Peninsula. Regional tourism search is where that decision starts, and it is usually the channel a cellar door has never been built for.
Proof in wine is earned. A Halliday rating, a show medal, a listing on a good wine list, a critic's note. None of it can be bought and all of it fades if it lives on a shelf talker and nowhere else. We build the rating and the release into one engine: the announcement, the list email, the page for that wine and that vintage, and the paid support behind allocation day. Your list, your ecommerce platform and your ad accounts sit in your name, because in this category the list is the business.
What we run.
Release day engine
List segmentation, allocation logic, the emails, the SMS, the landing page and the paid support, all built and tested before the release date. Members hear first, sell-through is visible in real time, and the wait list gets what is left.
Club retention lifecycle
The messages between releases that keep a member enrolled: the vintage report from the winemaker, the pick-up invitation, a pause option offered before someone cancels outright, and a win-back that fires on lapse rather than three months later.
Cellar door in regional tourism search
Being the answer when someone plans a weekend in your region, not only when they search your name. Maps, itineraries, booking pages, food, and the AI answers now sitting above all of it.
Compliant paid media
Age-gated campaigns on Meta and Google written to the ABAC code, with creative reviewed against it before production rather than after rejection, so a release campaign launches on the day it was planned to launch.
Rating and medal amplification
A score or a show result turned into a fortnight of work: the wine's own page, the list announcement, the trade note, cellar door collateral, and the search coverage that keeps it visible long after the announcement week.
Questions we get asked.
Yes, with age gating, correct audience configuration and creative written to the ABAC code. The platforms permit it, they simply reject work that ignores the rules. The practical difference is planning: creative is reviewed against the code at concept stage, so a release campaign is not being rebuilt on the morning it was meant to go live.
The part carrying the margin. Cellar door visitation, club acquisition and retention, ecommerce, and the brand equity that makes a distributor's job easier when they walk into an on-premise account. Trade and direct pull the same way when the direct work is visible, because a sommelier notices a wine people are already asking for.
Usually not. Flat membership with steady sign-ups is a retention problem, and it hides as a churn rate nobody has measured by cohort. We start by finding when members leave relative to their join date and which allocation they stop opening, then build the between-release communication that was never there.
You do, on your platform, in your name, from the first day. The list, the ecommerce account, the ad accounts and the domain. This category runs on repeat purchase from named people, so a list held anywhere other than your own systems is a risk to the business rather than a convenience.
Also in primary industries
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9 services under one team, run against the numbers your business already reports on.
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