Ep. 486 wine2wine 2020 Recording Session | Virtual Wine Tourism

Italian wine podcast. Chinchin with Italian wine people. Italian wine podcast as wine to wine twenty twenty media partner is proud to present a series of sessions chosen to highlight key themes and ideas and recorded during the two day event held on November twenty third and twenty fourth twenty twenty. Wine to Wine twenty twenty represented the first ever fully digital edition of the business to business form. Visit wine to wine dot net and make sure to attend future editions of wine to wine business form. I have the pleasure of introducing our next speaker Doctor. Liz Tosher is a master of wine and distinguished professor of wine and management at the groundbreaking wine business institute at Sonoma State University in California. Teaching in both the undergraduate and graduate wine MBA program. For those of you who have met her, you know, that Liz is a tireless educator and the researcher. Her expertise approachability and enthusiasm for wine have inspired a thousand of students to pursue careers in our wonderful industry. She has long been passionate about how we market and sell wines. An order of eight books, the latest, the award winning luxury wine marketing, focus on the art and science of luxury wine branding. A fifth degeneration, California, Liz makes her home in Sonoma County, where she and her husband farm a small vineyard. She has witnessed firsthand the struggles of wineries to attract visitors during times of crisis. In her role as an educator, she has the opportunity to research innovative solutions and share new insights that will help guide us all towards success. This year, she has dedicated herself to making COVID safe visits to as many of our local wineries as possible, both virtually and in person. I think that listening to her, we can get inspiration how to approach the one to reason when we will be out of this, terrible pandemia. Welcome, Lisa. We look forward to hearing from you today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Marisa. It's such a pleasure to be here today and to talk about virtual wine tourism. So I want to cover today a little bit of the foundation of just tourism in general and wine tourism before diving into virtual wine tourism. And then focusing on the growth drivers before major components and results to date and next steps. And I also have this picture here of, our tour bus in Italy, travel design Italy. I took twenty eight students to Southern Italy in May of twenty six team. We went to Campania and Sisley, and it was so incredible. And before that, we had done Tuscany. And so Italy is near and dear to my heart, and I look forward to the day I get to come back, face to face. But in the meantime, virtual wine tourism is something that is spreading all over the world. And, so we want to talk a little bit about how that came to be because it's probably not going to go away. I think it's a a new thing that that will stay with us. So just a little bit of background on tourism in general, you probably are aware that the United Nations World tourism organization collects statistics from around the world every year, very impressive, showing that in twenty nineteen, there were one point five billion tourists four percent from twenty eighteen, spending two point nine trillion US dollars. So tourism is super important all over the world and especially for wine countries. We can see here from this chart, looking at receipts per arrival that Italy is ranking at at, level six at this point. So very impressive. The other thing about tourism, some of you may recognize that one in every ten jobs in the world is in tourism. So it's very important for our global economy. And in fact, ten percent of the world's GDP comes from tourism. But as you can imagine, this year, with COVID, that has gone down seventy percent with a loss of anywhere from one hundred to a hundred million jobs at risk. And so this is where global wine tourism can at least support us a little bit, until we can get back to normal. So let's talk a little bit about wine tourism then. Just to let you know, there are more than one hundred different types of tourism such things as medical tourism and historical tourism and whiskey tourism and of course wine tourism, which we're all interested in. And there has been lots of research on this topic showing that there are many benefits such, as increased wine sales when the visitor gets to come to the winery. And now the visitor is visiting the winery virtually, higher margins, jobs for the local community, attracting new consumers, fostering brand loyalty, and partnerships throughout the community. The hotels, the rest restaurants, the tour, the tour buses and everything. Everything is linked to wine, wine tourism this way. And, many regions do economic impact studies on the importance of wine tourism every few years. They don't do the studies every year because they're expensive, but but twenty seventeen is the last time we did this in America, showing forty three million wine tours come to America every year, producing seventeen point six billion dollars in wine related tourism. Same thing in California. Twenty three point six million tourists came generating seven point two billion. And in Italy, we have the same thing in twenty seventeen. One in four tourists come to Italy for wine and food made in Italy generating twelve billion euros. So you can see how important, tourism is, all over the world, and especially to wine producing countries. So let's move on now to virtual tourism and see where that fits into the big picture. So here's tourism in general. Pract traveling for pleasure and relaxation, wine tourism, visiting vineyards, wineries, wine, festivals, for recreation, and now we have virtual wine tourism, virtual visitation to vineyards wineries and wine events via digital technologies for the purpose of enjoyment and education. And education has been added here because what we find with the virtual is that there is an educational component as well as the, pleasure and the enjoyment of tourism. And we see the same kind of benefits with virtual wine tourism, brand awareness, especially revenue generation if the tourists can be inspired to to purchase wine online from the winery website or from a partner, online retailer and brand loyalty over time. So let's take a look at the growth drivers. Obviously, we know COVID is one of them, but there are other drivers that are causing virtual wine tourism to increase around the world. One of these is just technology. If you think about the growth in technology over the last ten years, that has really helped virtual wine tourism. Come into, birth. For example, last or this year alone, there were four point five seven billion people, active internet users as of twenty, twenty July. So this is nearly six percent of the global population, which is online. We also have changing demographics here in the US, for example, we have aging wine consumers who aren't traveling as much, and so they enjoy being a virtual wine tourist from the comfort of their home. And, then you have the younger consumers such as our generation z and younger millennials who are immersed in technology and want to learn about wine, via technology. And then, of course, we have global warming. We have all seeing the wildfires that ravaged the vineyards of Australia and California record heat waves across Europe and flooding and hurricanes. Old global global warming is not going anywhere. It's going to be with us for a while until we solve the problem. So because of this, every time the news media flashes these terrifying photos of wineries burning or flooding across the the world news, this hurts tourism. And it's difficult for these wine regions to reassure people that it's okay and it's safe to come back. So this is another reason that virtual wine tourism has become more important. And then, of course, we have crisis earthquakes, which have occurred in the Chilean, wine region, New Zealand, Italy, and California, pandemics, of course, and terrorism even hurts tourism. If we think about, Spain and and France and some of the issues that have occurred there over the past few years. So all of these issues come together to hurt wine tourism, part tourism in general, and therefore virtual tourism has become more important. So there are four major components of virtual wine tourism, and I will describe each of these. The first is virtual wine tours. So the definition here is the wine tours tours the winery or the wine region virtually by using their computer, tablet, or smartphone. And the purpose is to entice them to someday want to visit in person. But in the meantime, encourage them to try the wines of the estate by seeking them out on a local, retail shop or online. And it's really important to provide links on the winery and regional websites as well as focus on social media and YouTube to promote this type of, wine tourism. And in terms of tours, there are three major types of tours. One of them you are familiar with because many wineries have been doing this for quite a number of years, and that is in using engaging online videos. It's important to do this now more than ever. These do not have to be terribly expensive to produce. They can actually be more simple. But there are many different times. So the idea here is to allow the virtual visitor to see the entrance to the wine read, step into the tasty room, walk through the vineyards and the sellers, and see all this in a video. Now these videos can be fun and whimsical. This one, for example, is one of Vista winery in California. It's the oldest commercial winery in California, and it was actually started by account from Hungary. And so the winery hires a professional actor to dress up like the count and make these videos. And when you visit this winery, you often see the count walking around. So it's it's very fun to, to have this type of thing. But on the other hand, you can have classy and very elegant videos like that of Antinori, which is just so beautiful to watch. It's like art watching it and really makes you want to taste the wines of Antinori and visit. So another type of tour is called the three sixty photo tour. And these are up also equally engaging and sort of a newer technology using a three sixty, camera. So filmed in three sixty format and then edited so that the visitor can go on and click on the link and literally walk through the rooms of this winery, walk into the vineyards. See the sellers down below. This is one that's, a winery in Paso Robos, California. And this is a technique that actually doesn't cost that much to do. You just need a good photographer, and you can put these together, without too much work. And they are really enjoyable to use. You can also use them on a mobile phone. Now, the most advanced type of video tour, we're starting to see more of this now. Are we call them three sixty video tours. This is where you do need to have a special three sixty video camera and have it professionally edited, and, the tourist needs to purchase these, VR glasses. They're quite cheap. Five, ten dollars online. A lot of young people have these already for gaming. And, these are such fun videos to watch. You can watch them without the glasses, but they're not as much, enjoyable. Here's one that's in Champagne. And you watch this, it's like being on a roller coaster. You really feel like you are riding on a tractor through the vineyards of Champagne. And here's one that's at Washington State in the United States, and it's, the fourteen, horse hands a winery, and you see the horse's galloping. It's it's a very exciting, this type of, of, tour. So, the other aspect of videos that are important is, just innovative videos that help, tourists know that it's safe to come back to your region. So for example, we have two here. I wish we had time to watch, but maybe you could watch them later. This is a one minute video of, Napa Valley after the two thousand seventeen fires, and it was to encourage tours to come back, that it was safe to come back. And you have these three people dressed up as nights, and they're walking through Napa Valley saying, it looks safe. Come back. And this one here was just recently developed in Sonoma County, but COVID, basically saying it is safe to come and pick up your wine. We will put it in your car for you. We will wear masks and gloves and have a san hand sanitizer. And it's a really fun one to watch. It's a spoof on Paul Simon's song, fifty ways to leave your lover, and it fifty ways to get your wine now. So this type of innovation, I think, is very important, especially in times of crisis, and especially as part of virtual wine tourism. So then we move on to the second aspect of virtual wine tourism, and these are virtual wine tastings. And this was extremely popular in the United States and still is going on. And virtual tastings allow customers to experience a wine tasting from the comfort of their home. And they, use here she has a, her laptop. You can use a computer. You can even use your smartphone to participate in these, but you do need the interactive software. I think all of us know about Zoom, Webex, FaceTime, streaming services on Instagram, and so forth. So there are two major types of virtual wine tastings. The first is called streaming large group tastings, and these are wonderful because thousands of people can participate for free. And they do, by clicking on a link to register the tasting that is scheduled. And then their emails are collected. So the winery for the wine retailer can stay in touch with these consumers. Then visitors can elect to watch the tasting, with or without the wine. So they're given a link to purchase wines. And so many purchase wines and some just decide to watch. The moderator could be the wine maker or the owner or somebody who's an expert at moderating. And these usually last thirty to sixty minutes and participants can ask questions via the chat function. Sort of like what we're doing today with the wine to wine conference. And then the other benefit is it can be taped and the video can be posted on the winery website or fan page for future viewing. So here we have two examples. This is William Chris vineyards. He is in Texas, and he does these on, let's see, at Facebook, and he does the streaming videos, and he works with his executive chef to pair his wines to food. And so lots people, especially from his wine club participate. And then this is wine dot com. Wine dot com is a very large wine online wine retailer, and they have been very, very successful this year with their virtual wine tastings at home. And again, it's streaming and with the winemakers, with predicts they've even brought in movie stars, and, anybody can watch for free, but it's a lot more fun if you purchase it. So this is an extremely successful, method. Similar to this is what we call intimate small group tastings. So this is for a smaller group of people, ten to thirty. It's much more interactive in nature and requires advanced planning. So here, consumers must sign up on the winery website, purchase the wine in advance. So here, everybody does have the wine, and it's purchased in advance to their house for the session. And these sessions are usually not videotaped. The participants can ask questions in real time of the winery. So here is an example from Clota Ball winery in Napa Valley, and you get to come to their website in choose your tasting package and decide which wines you wanna taste and select your time and then you get to meet with the winemaker over a but professional hospitality rep pool through the tasting. So the third type of virtual wine tourism then is, our events. And these are private wine events that are self directed by the consumer who decides on the event, and then contacts the winery. So here we have a birthday party. You could do a baby shower, girl night in anniversary party, team building sessions, many kinds of events. And then the customer works with the winery, purchase the wine in advance and sends it out to everybody who's going to be attending the event. They select the date and the time and the technology. And then, it's all set up. So there are now a a number of new companies, niche companies that have started offering this service. So this is probably gonna continue to grow. The nice thing about this is corporations can also start businesses can start to get involved and do this for their employees as a fun team building. And then finally, the last type of virtual wine tourism is sort of in the future, but it's fun to look at these technologies see what might happen. For example, we see now the possibility in the future of having the wines delivered to your house by a drone. We also have three d wine printers where you can print your own wine glasses. In the future, we will have digital scent technology where you can you'll be able to smell the wine on your phone. Right now, today, we already have very smart wine bottles, wine bottles with augment and reality labels that can talk to you and so forth, but this will only continue. And we might have a lot more different types of videos that we can watch on the wine bottle. And then in the far future, maybe ten years down the road, but we will be able to visit wineries as a holographic image. So I wanted to talk about some results to date, from this year. Not all of these are due to virtual wine tourism because it's So relatively new, it's hard to track, but, a definitely a portion of these results are. So, for example, this is from Nelson, and they are tracking online wine sales in the US since COVID. So these numbers are from September twenty twenty. And just to let you know before COVID in the United States, only five percent of wine was sold online. Most of it was sold in restaurants and grocery stores. And, so since COVID, wine sales online have been up two hundred and thirty four percent. This number is quite amazing since September of twenty twenty. Just to let you know, wine sales in off premise establishments, like grocery stores, unwind shops are up eighteen percent in the US. But the online has just exploded. And again, this is not just due to virtual wine tasting, but a good portion of this is due to virtual wine tastings and events. And if you look at this, this map here, you can see when COVID first started in March and April, we hit a huge high of five hundred percent growth rates in our mind. And this was total alcohol, but now we are at two fifty six. It's still this is an amazing number, and of this two hundred and thirty four percent is wine. Another piece of data is a study we did at Snow State University in, September of this year. We interviewed a hundred and thirty five California winery executives asking them what they're doing to increase revenue during this difficult time. And, you may not be surprised to learn that large percentage of them have shifted their wine sales to online through their own website and working in partnership with online retailers, and they are shifting their product to direct to consumer, which is selling wine directly to consumer through their wine club online and allocation, reaching out to customers online and saying, would you like to buy this special wine? And this this is really driven revenue during difficult time. And then finally, the last piece of data I wanted to share is from Sobos Ship compliant. This is a group that tracks US online wine resales. And this is through October of this year. So this is shipments directly from wineries to customers. So this is a lot of this is is related to virtual wine tourism. And they say they have reached historic highs that they have never seen. Nineteen percent increase in volume and eight percent increase in value during this this time. So as you can see, virtual wine tourism has made an impact. It's at least it's at least part of these numbers. So in terms of next steps, here are some things that you can do if you were a winery or if you are, in a wine association, Wine Region. Is first of all, make sure that you start producing some online tours. Create some online video tours. Maybe you already have some, maybe create some more. Both serious and fun can consider doing some filming in three d. Make sure you post on your winery website, consider starting a YouTube channel and your social media outlets. Next, make if you haven't tried virtual tasting yet, give one a try. You might be surprised, at how exciting and fun they are. Scheduled them both for the trade and consumer. We've been doing a lot of trade. Once here's one, I thought that we just did with, Lasvokka, but from Gadi, I was participating in this. It was a small trade tasting for wine riders. But a lot are being done for consumers. As well. I just did a large consumer tasting on Saturday. We had over two hundred wine consumers from across America. We were meeting with a winery in Bordeaux. So that was very fun. And then virtually Vince, so developed some innovative virtual wine events that can be customized just for your consumers and, create some partnerships with online retailers, wine apps. So we have wine dot com and Divino, but there's many others around the world that you can partner with and restaurants. So here is an example of these are Alexander Valley wineries, winemakers. This is in Sonoma County, and they are partnering with the local chefs, and they're doing a weekly one hour virtual tasting of the wines with the food from the chef. So this is a fun thing that anybody can do in any place around the world. And then finally, it's really important to enhance your digital marketing, which is a key piece of this. Make sure your search engine optimization is working correctly, social media, e commerce, make sure you get your wine on the wine apps and you work with them such as like wine surgery. Make sure they have the data and the stories about your winery, and your mobile, platforms as well. So thank you very much. I will pause to see if there may be any questions for coming. And so I don't know if, you will be able to answer to all of them. One very important is that, statistically, it looks like, around the half of the wine tourism go to California to Napa in the USA. And, in, in other countries, we think that we don't have the same concentration because, you know, we have to learn from California. Italy is the country of wine country of art and beauty, but I think that California was able to develop the wine tourism much better and to interact with the product consumers. So what do you think about this? Which kind of suggestion do you have for us, Italian wine producer? Well, the Italian wine producers are are doing an excellent job because Italian wine is the number one wine that we import to the United state. But in terms of tourism, I have been to Italy many times and visited at the wineries. The one thing I did notice is that you often have to make an appointment, it's not so easy just to to stop by and visit. And in in a lot of our wineries in the United States, Oregon, Washington, New York, Texas. There's lots of wineries all over the United States. There's actually more outside of California now than in. A lot of these wineries you can just miss this before COVID. You can stop by without an appointment. So, you know, I don't know if this is possible for for Italy to look at it, creating more opportunities for a tourist to just you know, wander by. I remember one time I was in Tuscany with my mother and we wanted to go wine tasting. We couldn't find any wineries that were open without an appointment. So that's one possibility. Or even, you know, I know you have in the towns places where there's a wine center and people can go there to taste the taste the wine. But with virtual tourism now, you can start start reaching out to people with some great videos. And as I mentioned, try to do some more virtual partial tastings with consumers. So another question is, virtual wine tourism have a certain impact in term of cost. Small wineries can afford this kind of cost how expensive it can be for a small winery to organize the virtual wine tourism. Oh, you know, that's actually one of the great things about virtual wine tourism is it's actually not that expensive, especially, you don't have to do a professional video. You can use your, your smartphone and go film and create a video. Oftentimes, just like things that are authentic, consider doing a YouTube channel, which doesn't cost that much, and then post those link those to your your website. So I think videos are a great way to get started. Another thing you can do is it's very important and I don't know how how this is being done in Italy, but to to capture your the the customer's email information. So one of the things that California does very well is when people come to visit, they they say, please drop your card and lose this this bowl. So you have your email or please sign up for our email list. So that this way, the winery can email the customer and invite them to a virtual tasting. And we also have wine clubs, which are very popular. And so people was sign up for the wine club, and they give the credit card to the winery, and they can do this online. And then the winery ships the wine every three or four months. And so they become a member of this club, and they get benefits, they get discounts, When they visit, they can taste for free. So these are ways we call this CRM, a customer relationship management, database management, data analytics. All of this is super important now for virtual wine tourism, and it's it's important to start capturing the customer data. Okay. I think we can have another question. It's virtual wine tourism for you. A more branding, marketing solution, and how it can boost the wine sales and open up new markets? Yeah. Definitely. It's a branding, method. It it it so it creates brand awareness. So consumers find out about you. Like, for example, TikTok. I know there's a session on TikTok. TikTok is so hot with, young consumers, and I teach twenty one year olds. They're telling me, I saw this winery put a video on TikTok, and they went out and bought their wine. So, yes, the brand awareness is is a is a big piece of this. So put your videos on TikTok too. Videos are super important now. The the growth is gonna be not seventy percent videos. So it creates brand awareness for new consumers who may not have ever heard of you before. And also, it depends on who your consumer is. You targeting young consumers? Are you targeting luxury? A high end consumers? You know, like, Antonori has this beautiful video for luxury consumers. Somebody else might have a great video for TikTok consumers. So brand awareness for sure the other key part though is, to sell wine, you need to drive people to your to your website and have a way to sell wine from your website, or it or work with an online wine retailer. To make sure that, that they can find your line online and purchase it. My feeling is that we don't we don't we don't have to overload the our customer our people that like our wine with too many information. My feeling is that we have to show them that we are realting and to share what we do in the vineyard and we what we do in the binary. This I think is, kind of, quality in term of communication. Excellent. Do you agree with this? Yes. Tell your story. Tell the story of the winery. What is unique about your your vineyard, your wine, your story. Tell the story. That's what people want to hear. The famous storytelling. Anyway, thank you very much, Lisa. I think we are running out of time. I really appreciate, your presentation, and I'm sure that it was, very important to many other wine producers like me. And we love a virtual wine tourism, but we hope that very soon, we will go back, to the real team. Me too. Thank you, Marisa, for your excellent moderation, and thank you. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you. Listen to the Italian wine podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya FM, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time.