“WineRamp” is an important new initiative to try to overcome obstacles to the continued growth in the U.S. wine market. The idea, in simple terms, is that younger consumers aren’t finding the on-ramp to wine that the baby-boom generation discovered back in the day. What’s the problem? Well, it is complicated, of course, and there are many factors at work here.

Got Your Moo-Stache?

But one issue is simple. There are literally thousands of wine brands on U.S. shelves and each one promotes its own products. But no one is telling the story of Brand Wine. WineRamp hopes to fill in that gap.

It is still early days and impossible to know what WineRamp might look like if it gains the necessary industry support. Some people think of it as a “Got Milk?” program for wine. “Got Milk?”, you may recall, was a very popular generic promotion campaign for dairy milk, with television, print, and more components. You might remember the photos of celebrity endorsers with their white “moo-staches.”

“Got Milk?” was successful in raising awareness, but as I wrote on The Wine Economist a few years ago, it could not prevent the slowly evolving collapse of milk consumption in the United States as consumers opted for other products, especially plant-based non-dairy milks. Got Milk? Yes, but increasingly it is made from almonds or oats.

Grass Roots Initiatives

Generic marketing campaigns are inherently top-down projects, but that’s not the only possible strategy. Mobilizing forces at the grass roots level is another option. Neither approach is easy or guaranteed to work. What would a grass roots wine project look like?

“License to Steal” (aka LTS) is the name of the national wine marketing conference, which will be held this year on March 22-24, 2022 in association with the Eastern Winery Exposition in Syracuse, New York. License to Steal? Well, the idea is that everyone brings their best ideas about how to reach consumers and promote wine in a sort of open-source environment where sharing and stealing go hand-in-hand.

I started thinking about License to Steal when Donniella Winchell, the driving force behind the 15-year old initiative, asked me to recommend someone to record a brief “Crypto 101” video for the program. I’ll do it, I said. It will give me a good excuse to do some research and get up-to-speed on blockchain, crypto-currencies, NFTs, and so forth.

Gulliver in Lilliput?

The LTS program includes presentations and discussions that are relevant to all wineries, but especially the ones that I think of as “grass roots” American wine. Some U.S. wineries are huge (Gallo produces an estimated 100 million cases a year) and sell in broad national and even global markets. Gallo towers over the U.S. wine industry like Gulliver in Lilliput.

But most of the 11.300 US and 872 Canadian wineries are smaller — much smaller — producing 10,000 or 5000 or even fewer than 1000 cases of wine each year. These wineries succeed or fail depending upon how well they connect with local communities, forging wine-based relationships one happy consumer at a time.

Each of these Lilliputian wineries is small by itself, but there are so many of them that they can make a difference. That’s how grass roots connections work and it would be a mistake to underestimate their current and potential aggregate impact on wine in American society.

While we are thinking about top-down wine promotion, I think it is important keep the grass roots in mind, too.  LTS is a powerful tool and the dozens of regional and local wine associations and their members. Can they be persuaded to sing a song of wine (with local variations, of course) to win the ear of hesitant consumers? E pluribus unum is a worthy goal.