WTN Blog

Wine Pronunciation Guide

Wine pronunciation and understanding how a wine is named can be confusing to the novice of wine. If you were raised in Tennessee or born in Napa county or even France training is key.  Don’t let them fool you. Every sommelier was not born with a cabernet in their bottle. Understanding how wine is named is easy to understand even for the novice at wine. Saying the name can sometimes be tricky and a southern drawl has its challenges but with the resources below we’ll get you through it so you may gain confidence in your wine knowledge. This lesson contains two tools. The first is a chart to help you understand how wines get their name. Tool two is how to pronounce the most common wine names.

 Please refer to the attached as a tool and stay tuned to learning the would of wines…

Wine Pronunciation Guide

 Cheers!

E-commerce Strategy Tips

• Enhance your web offerings with a “Not available in Stores” feature separate from the distributor allocation
• Create hooks for your consumers by offering tasting room and winery ecommerce site exclusive products for a limited time period to support your brand prior to offerings via the broad market
• Reward loyal customers or club members with a first opportunity to purchase via your web-store prior to broad market release.
• Ease the risk of channel conflict - no price discrepancies with exclusives
• The web is a vehicle for allocations too small to go through distributors
• An affordable way to test new products
• Use exclusives to create a story for a new label prior to launching in the broad market
• Move wine out the door with a high profit.
• Always communicate any offerings, exclusives, email blasts or special offerings that may impact your normal sales volume with your fulfillment provider WTN Services in advance of the project to ensure proper production planning and quality of execution.

See your WTN Services Account Manager for further tips for sales success.

“Best practices” in winery email marketing means that the winery or wine retailer must make the effort to periodically evaluate the email itself and not just analyze the results the campaign generates. Below is a WTN Services White Paper on “Best Practices in Email Refinement.” Common sense basics that should be reviewed periodically to ensure email campaign success for the winery.

WTN Services- Winery Email Refinement

Always remember to communicate with the WTN Services team of any email blasts that may impact order volume. Your account manager is avalable and eager to work with your team to ensure the end product delivery represents the looks and feel of the offering in your email blast. Partnering with your WTN Services fulfillment provider ensures the quality of the end consumer experience meeting the wine consumer expectation of the email offering.

The wine marketplace is becoming more and more competitive. Quality customer experiences and customer trust is a key measure of winery success and profits. Outside the wine industry, consumers are having a harder time than ever getting service from the companies they do business with. Wineries and wine retailers must apply the lessons learned from other industries to ensure we do not loose customer trust. Here is a fact to ponder and consider how it applies to your winery…

The “Customer Experience Report” conducted by Harris Interactive and RightNow Technologies found that almost every US consumer surveyed (96%) had a negative service experience in the past year, and 80% ceased doing business when the service experience was negative.

Have you conducted a “winery customer experience report” within the last year? Customers that are inactive or drop from your wine clubs are a key measure of your customer satisfaction levels. Are you polling, tracking and monitoring their experience levels?

In today’s work environment, resources of human capital and systems capital can pull team focus into hundreds of competing none core directions. The result can be distractions and failure to execute on the key goal toward excellence.

Does everyone in your company know the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG)? Is that goal a good goal and correct for the company?  Does your fulfillment partner, e-commerce partner and other strategic business partnerships know their role in achieving that goal?

The book Built to Last touches on the concept.Key to selecting a good BHAG according to Good to Great is…

• Understand what you are deeply passsionate about include core values and purpose.
• What can your company be best in the world at executing?
• What drives your economic engine?

Those three questions in perspective help create an understanding of your business and creating a BHAG that is powerful for your winery, retail wine company or corporation.

Let us know you Big Hairy Audacious Goals and how you arrived at them. Sharing the insight of that goal with your partner fulfillment -WTN and e-commerce company is key to execution and partnered success.

To Big Hairy Audacious Goals and Success!

Chris

The term quality or excellence means different things to different people. A quality wine may be one that is succulent in taste or the flavor is exactly as we expect. A definition by J.M Juran (1988): “Quality is fitness for use.” However, there are other definitions. Quality as “conformance to specifications, service level agreements or business requirements” is a position that people in the manufacturing or services industry often promote. 

Others promote wider views the expectation that a product or service exceeds the expectations of the customer is quality plain and simple. While still others view quality as a judgment or perception by customers or users of a product or service; it is the extent to which the customers or users believe the product or service surpasses their needs and expectations. 

How do you view quality in your own company, of your team members and of your vendors? 

• Meet customer standards? 

• Meet and fulfill customer needs? 

• Meet customer expectations? and 

• Will meet unanticipated future needs and aspirations? 

 Still others plainly ignore definitions and say “I’ll know quality when I see it.”  It seems that we all ‘know’ or ‘feel’ somehow what quality is when we experience it. 

A product or service that exceeds our preconceived ideas about the quality of the service to be received is likely to be designated as a quality service. It is equally clear that the best of a group of bad products or services is not likely to be perceived as a quality product or service.  

WTN Services is focused head on, in building quality tools and methodologies to help our company, our clients, vendors and partners to work and benchmark to improve quality at all levels. In upcoming postings, we will share with our reader’s efforts we are implementing to create tools for quality improvement. These processes and tools are being developed and used internally for improvement and required of our vendors. The benefit is to build quality and excellence. Through quality and excellence our clients will better be able to focus on execution of developing great wines and owning their sales strategies partnered with WTN Services for their facilitation of service needs.  

We are committed to stepping it up and sharing our partnered learning’s, by doing so we drive the industry by continuous quality improvement towards excellence. Understanding of quality methodologies for winery sales, fulfillment and partnering will mature in the coming years.  

Our WTN Services Team asks for your comments and input, your feedback and participation and your needs and desires so we can work together on a mission of setting new standards of quality for the wine industry. Please email cedwards@winetasting.com your idea’s thoughts and feedback concerning excellence.