Ep. 2461 Juliana Colangelo interviews John Gillespie of Wine Opinions LLC | Masterclass US Wine Market

We're joined by John Gillespie, the founder and CEO of wine opinions, one of the most respected voices in US wine market research. John and his team recently released new research that dives deep into how twenty one to thirty nine year old beverage alcohol consumers perceive and are engaging with wine today in the United States. And our three key takeaways and what we're really gonna focus on are number one, what are the biggest barriers in the wine industry for younger consumers? Number two, how can wine better appeal to younger audiences finally, number three, how can wineries utilize the great insights and information that you gather from your surveys into actionable next steps for their business? Hello. Welcome to Masterclass US wine market with me, your host. Juliana Colangelo. This show has been designed to demystify the US market for Italian wineries through interviews with experts in sales and distribution, social media, communications, and so much more. We'll we'll quiz each of our esteemed guests in every episode to solidify the lessons that we've learned from the episode. So sharpen your pencils, get out your notebooks, and join us this week to learn more about the US market. Hello. Welcome to Mass or class US wine market. Today on the Italian wine podcast, we are joined by John Gillespie, the founder and CEO of wine opinions, one of the most respected voices in US wine market research. With decades of experience gathering insights from both consumers and the trade, John and his team recently released new research that dives deep into how twenty one to thirty nine year old beverage alcohol consumers perceive and are engaging with wine today in the United States. Spoiler alert, It's not all rosy. So we'll impact the biggest findings and what they mean for the future of the wine industry on today's episode with John. John, thank you so much for joining us today and the podcast. It's great to have you here. Well, I'm delighted to be here. So before we dive into the data and the survey, which we're excited to learn more about, tell us a little bit more about how you found yourself in this world of wide market research. Well, when I finished graduate school, I went to New York City looking for a job in publishing. And as it so happened a couple of weeks after I got to New York, there was an opening for an editor at a wine magazine, and I was lucky enough to get that position and found myself in the wine business without really trying. I was really more interested in editing. Wow. And that opened a lot of doors for me in in the wine business. And after a little while, you know, maybe a year or so, I moved over into public relations in New York and worked for an agency that ran the promotional campaigns in the US for the French government for, both for Bordeaux as a as a wine region and also for the wines of France in general. And I did that for a number of years before heading to California where I worked for a a company that owned four wineries in California doing communications and and public relations work. After that company was sold, which was, a number of years ago, I was lucky enough to be appointed the president of wine market council, which was a new organization that started a little more than twenty years ago in California with the goal of continually monitoring, consumers and members of the wine trade to provide data and information to the wine industry that would help it grow. Right. I did that for very nearly twenty years. And along the way, I started wine opinions as a way to provide that same kind of insight and, on consumers and the trade, not to the industry as a whole, but to independent wineries or wine companies or wine marketers who were more concerned with what their brands are doing in the market than the wine market as a whole. And so now wine opinions is, we've just started our twenty first year Amazing. We're lucky to to have worked with dozens of winery companies, in the United States and dozens of trade associations around the globe. All of whom, of course, have an interest in selling their wine on the US market. So there's a lot of work. There's a lot of work for wine market researchers in the US. Yeah. Especially right now, I'd imagine what the challenges we're seeing in the industry, and I think that leads us to the topic of today's interview. Our three key takeaways and what we're really gonna focus on are number one. What are the biggest barriers in the wine industry for younger consumers? Number two, how can wine better appeal to younger audiences? And finally, number three, how can wineries utilize the great insights and information that you gather from your surveys into actionable next steps for their business. And all of this, of course, informed by your recent survey. So, John, for starters, let's just, do a top line view. Tell us about was the impetus for the survey? When did it happen? And what did you really wanna accomplish with this most recent survey? Well, you know, in my opinions, we're our clients always ask us to do research among wine drinkers. Is perfectly sensible. You know, they're in the wine business, and they're, and they're looking to see whether, you know, wine drinkers like a a label alternative that they've come up with better than than one that they are currently employing in the market or how they're stacking up against their competitor wineries or wine regions. But, you know, we we find ourselves as an industry now in a position where over the last two and a half years, wine sales in the US have been in decline. Right. And the numbers tell us, the sales numbers tell us that one of the things driving that decline is a slower uptake of wine as part of the beverage alcohol mix among wine drinkers or, excuse me, among beverage alcohol drinkers under forty. So for the survey that we ran last month, that wine opinions we did not use the wine opinions national panel of US wine consumers because they're already US wine consumers. So instead, we went out and recruited a panel of beverage alcohol consumers in ages twenty one to twenty nine and thirty to thirty nine. And whether or not they'd drink wine was immaterial, knowing that we would get some who did and some who didn't and some who even preferred wine, and, you know, most who were more likely to be more interested in drinking beer or spirits. And so that gave us an opportunity. I think a unique opportunity to look at an audience that is a potential new audience for the wine market, but is not there yet. And that's really what we were more most interested in learning about, was who these folks are, what they like and don't like about the wines they've been exposed to, why they prefer beer and or spirits, to wine, and and all of those kinds of general areas where we could glean some interesting findings for our friends in the wine industry who are faced with, trying to win over, essentially, a new generation of beverage alcohol consumers into the wine space. Right. Because essentially, I mean, here with the impetus and and the really the objective with this survey is not to understand weinjers is to understand that people not drinking wine, right, and why they are not drinking wine. And it's simply like you said, how can the industry better win them over? Either not drinking wine, I would just interject either not drinking wine or drinking wine, but not really being wine drinkers if I can make that distinction. Yes. In other words, many many of these are people who, you know, they might have a friend who's a wine person. And whenever they go over to the friend's house, they drink wine with that friend. So they are drinking wine, but they're not what we would consider to be, you know, wine enthusiasts or wine drinkers. Right. So that's a really good distinction. They're they're drinking wine occasionally, but they're not classifying themselves or really considering wine as a regular part of their consumption behavior. That's exactly righ