Ep. 454 Steve Raye U.S. Market-Ready | Scores Matter

Thanks for tuning in. I'm Steve Ray, author of How To Get US Market Ready. And in this podcast, I'm going to share with you some of the lessons I've learned from thirty years in the wine and spirits business, helping brands enter and grow in the US market. I've heard it said that experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. My goal with the book and this podcast is to share my experience and the lessons learned from it with you so you can apply those lessons and be successful in America. So let's get into it. Hi. This is Steve Ray. This week, we're gonna be talking about ratings, evaluations, competitions, boil it all down. It's all about scores for wines and spirits. Scores matter. If you ask a dozen people in the wine and spirits trade in the US what the value of scores ratings reviews is, chances are you'll get two dozen different answers. Perhaps a better question to ask is, how can I use scores to support my brand? Well, for new to the US or new to the world brands, not having a US relevant score is what really matters. Because it's the reason a gatekeeper can then tell you, no, I'm not interested. So not having a score basically means better chance that you're gonna get hung up on. Scores certainly do have value and particularly so in certain retail stores, and to certain people. I mean, a lot of Americans shop by the number. They'll go into a minor spirits shop and they'll look at the shelf tags and see which has the highest rating for a given price. And they'll make the choice only on that one factor. More often than not, the number matters more than the source. The joke in the industry is back in the days when Robert Parker ruled the roost in terms of ratings and reviews. If you get above a ninety from Parker, you can't buy the wine as a consumer. And if you get below a ninety, you can't sell the wine as a producer. So ninety points is really the key factor. Often, the number is the only thing that the consumer can see that's not on the bottle, and it can be the decisive fact motivating them to choose that specific bottle over another one adjacent to it. For spirits, getting scores, rating, reviews, and so forth is a no brainer. I I recommend to all our spirit clients that they enter as many competitions as they can. And when they get a ninety plus or a gold or a double gold or platinum, chairman's trophy, or the like, then don't enter that competition again. And that's because chances are, you're not gonna get as high a score or award a second time. And one is sufficient. That's the big point. As a great example, gray goose built a billion dollar brand on the back of getting a top rating at BTI beverage testing Institute, which is at tastings dot com, when they first came to the US. That's right. They promoted their brand as best tasting vodka in the world, from I think it was maybe a nineteen eighty seven BTI competition and that one competition and that one score made the brand. In the case of wines, it's a bit more complicated and expensive. Vintage variations mean wine skews have to be entered and scored each year unlike spirits. So just because a wine may have been awarded to ninety one for the last year's chardonnay doesn't mean that that rating applies to this year. And many retailers are gonna ask you for updated or current ratings. For many wineries, it can be overwhelming. Gee, I have a portfolio of thirty SKUs. I can't afford to send in all thirty. Well, my recommendation is that wineries enter their best wines, the ones most likely to get a good score in the US market, and not just, and sometimes not even the volume or entry level brands. Because the umbrella effect of the single vineyard portfolio superstar, for example, can often pull the other products along with it. In the beginning here, I talked about US relevant. Let me address that as well. There's seems like a thousand competitions and a new one popping up every day. In the US, there is a limited set of about fifteen or twenty, really more like eight to twenty of these competitions ratings, reviews, evaluations. That retailers give credence to. It makes sense to give some thought to which ones you're going to enter and also which ones where you might have the best opportunity to get a high score. I publish an updated list of the upcoming wine and spirit competitions that are taking place in the United States for the coming year on my website at w w w dot nevology inc dot com. And it will be, I think, the second blog post that you see, if you click on blog, I will also include an updated list at w w w get US market ready dot com, the website for this book. And that'll give you direct links to the entry pages for all those competitions where you can look at cost per SKU, how many are needed, what the deadlines are, and so on and so forth. One of the challenges of entering your brands in competitions is that they take place only once a year, and it may be out of sync with your product development or your vintage cycle. So here's a case history of a shortcut to getting a product review that we came up with. And that's the bespoke review by Ultimate Wine Challenge. In fact, I helped give birth to the program. We had a client for which we needed to get some scores, but we had already missed the deadlines by the time we started working with that client. So I asked David Talbott, and Paul Packle to do a special review just for this one client's portfolio, the whole portfolio. I think there may have been forty wines. They said yes, and turned around the review in less than a month. We were able to use the review to help fine tune the products that we were staging for the US market and then pitch the whole portfolio to a new importer. Win, win win for everybody. So this remains a solution for the ultimate spirits challenge For the ultimate wine competition, it's only done on a bespoke basis. So if this sounds like something you're interested in, feel free to give David Talbot a call or reach out to him at email is talbot, t a l b o t. At ultimate hyphen beverage dot com. In fact, I've got a review, that they're doing for me right now. I published a list of all of the competitions and links to all the various details on my website at bevology inc dot com. If you click on blogs, it'll be there, in the first one or two posts. This year, because of COVID nineteen, there's been a lot of changes in when and how those competitions take place. So definitely important to check on the details on each one as the timing may have changed. But thinking about which ones to to enter, they really fall into two basic categories, those that allow products that are not currently imported into the US to enter, and those that don't. In the case of wine, specifically, the top ones that I think matter are PTI or beverage testing institute, San Francisco International Wine competition, James Suckling, and all those three will allow wines that are not imported into the US to enter. And then, of course, there's wine spectator and wine enthusiasts Both of them very important publications, but they only accept the wines that are currently sold somewhere in the United States. And the on premise side, there's a couple of other ones that matter. One is decanter. It certainly has a lot of clout, but not so much distribution in the US. And Texam, which is a, obviously, a Somoye oriented competition, but they do accept not currently sold in the US brands, and it's, a great one to enter. On the spirits and wine side, not just purely wine, The ones that don't allow not currently imported wines to enter are the W SWA annual convention. That's the wine and spirits wholesalers association. And that's one that you don't hear about a lot, but can be very significant. They have a program called Brand Battle, which has turned out to be very, very successful for a couple of clients who have placed high in that competition. And then the other one that doesn't accept wines that are not currently imported, is wines and spirits magazine. That's a solo publication. It's still very important to the trade. And then the three that do allow entries by brands not currently imported are the ultimate spirits challenge. The San Francisco World spirits competition, and the New York International Wine and spirits competitions. There's two of them there. The wines are separate from spirits, but you can reach them all at New York International. This is Steve Ray, same. Thanks again for listening. On behalf of the Italian wine podcast, The easiest way for me to grow as a person is to surround myself with people smarter than I.