Every masterclass, every tech sheet, every press trip in wine is built to win over one person, and it is never the person who actually pulls the cork on a Tuesday night. Picture the last campaign you paid for. The tasting notes, the terroir map, the story about your grandfather and his old vines. Now picture the room it was made for. A sommelier, a distributor rep, an importer, maybe a journalist with a deadline. Every one of them a middleman. Not one of them the person your wine is actually for.
That is not a slip. It is how the whole machine is wired, and it is quietly costing you the sale at the only end that pays. You probably already sense that your marketing points at the trade. What is worth sitting with is why it has to, and what that does to your sales at the far end of the chain.
Look at how the rest of the drinks world behaves. Heineken pours tens of millions a year into putting its name straight in front of the person who drinks it: a UEFA Champions League sponsorship it has held for three decades, Formula 1 races carrying its name since 2016, adverts built around faces you actually recognise. Beer talks to the drinker. Wine talks to the shop. Our version of consumer marketing is a trade-magazine ad only the trade reads, or a newspaper column written by a wine writer, which is one honest opinion and, so they tell us, cannot be bought. Heineken builds a relationship with the person holding the glass. Wine builds a relationship with the person selling to the person holding the glass. Same shelf, opposite strategy.
The trade is not your customer, it just acts like one
In most markets, and by law in the United States, you do not sell wine to the person who drinks it. You sell to a distributor, who sells to a shop or a restaurant, who sells to the drinker. Three tiers, two walls, and you are standing on the far side of both. On paper your customer is the distributor, so you market to the distributor. Perfectly rational. Also the trap.
Because once your customer is the buyer, everything you make gets shaped for the buyer. The deck speaks fluent trade. The tasting gets scored on structure and ageing potential. The press trip is built to impress people who taste 200 wines a week and have heard every origin story twice. You are not wrong to do it. You are just building for the gate and calling it marketing.
A handful of gatekeepers, and everyone shouting at them
The reason the pressure on that gate is so brutal is a number most winemakers never get shown. In 1995 the United States had roughly 1,800 wineries and more than 3,000 distributors to carry their wine. Today there are more than 9,200 wineries and fewer than 1,200 distributors. The producers multiplied, the gatekeepers shrank by two thirds.
Sit with that ratio. More than nine thousand brands, competing for the attention of a shrinking handful of companies that decide what ever reaches a shelf. Of course your marketing points at them. When a few players hold the only doors, everyone builds their entire pitch around getting through a door, and the drinker on the other side becomes an afterthought. A consumer in a slide footnote. A demographic, instead of a person with a corkscrew.
Your story dies at every handoff
Say you win. Your wine gets listed. Time to celebrate, and then watch what actually happens to the story you paid to tell.
You told it, in full, to the distributor rep. That rep carries hundreds of labels, so they re-tell maybe one sentence of it to the sommelier, on a good day. The sommelier, buried in a Friday service, re-tells maybe five words to the guest: this one is lovely with the lamb. And the guest, the person actually spending the money, holding the glass, being the entire point of the exercise, hears none of what you built. The terroir, the grandfather, the fifteen years of replanting. Gone. It fell out of the relay on the first pass.
This is the part nobody says out loud. Winning the buyer does not mean your story reaches the drinker. It means your story reaches the buyer, and then has to survive being retold, by people with no time and no stake, through two more sets of hands. Most stories do not survive that trip. They were never built to.
None of this is a knock on the great ones. There are sommeliers, importers and shop owners who carry a wine's story like it is their own and will happily talk your vineyard for twenty minutes, and they are some of my favourite people in this trade. But you cannot build a business model on hoping every pair of hands is that dedicated. The structure has to work even when the person on the other end is slammed, tired, and carrying four hundred other labels.
The drinker is where the money went missing
If it is tempting to file the drinker under someone else's problem, look at what the industry itself is quietly panicking about. When the Wine Market Council asked its members for the single most important thing to research in 2025, the answer was not tariffs, not distribution, not oak. It was reducing the barriers that stop ordinary people from buying wine. Seventy percent of the drinkers they studied named health as a reason they drink less. A large share of occasional drinkers said they find wine shopping intimidating. Intimidating. The thing you have spent a career making feel special, and the person at the shelf feels too stupid to reach for it.
Meanwhile US wine sales slid again in 2025, down to around 329 million cases, and roughly half of wineries rated their own year negatively. That is not a listings problem you can solve with a better trade deck. The far end of the chain, the drinker, has quietly checked out, and no amount of trade marketing pulls them back, because trade marketing was never pointed their way. The drinkers the trade writes off as hard to reach are not rejecting wine, a case I made in Gen Z Isn't Killing Wine. They are rejecting being marketed at through three walls they cannot even see.
Winning the buyer isn't the same as reaching the drinker. It just feels like it, until the numbers arrive.
The mindshift: build a story that survives being retold
Here is the shift, and it costs you nothing but a change of aim. Stop building marketing that stops at the buyer. Start building story material designed to travel, all the way down the chain, to the person holding the glass. I have written before about why telling your wine's story is not the same as selling it. This is the structural reason it so often fails to sell: the story never reaches the mouth it was written for.
In practice, that looks like four moves:
- Give the buyer a line, not a lecture. Hand over one sentence so good the rep cannot help repeating it. If your whole origin story cannot survive being compressed into a single sticky line, it will not survive the relay. Write that line yourself, do not leave it to a stranger with a deadline.
- Arm every set of hands with drinker-ready material. Not just a trade deck. A back label that talks to a human, a card for the table, a thirty-second film behind a QR code, a shelf-talker written for the person paying rather than the person buying in. Give each pair of hands something they can pass on intact.
- Make the story physical. The thing that survives two retellings is almost never a tasting note. It is a picture, an object, a one-line hook the guest can repeat at their own dinner table. Build for the retelling, not the tasting bench.
- Talk to the drinker directly where the law lets you. Your own site, your newsletter, your socials all sit outside the three-tier wall. That is the one channel where you reach the glass with nobody editing you down, so use it like it is the only door you own, because it is.
None of this fires the buyer. You still need the gate, and you still need to charm it. But the winery that wins the next decade is not the one with the slickest trade deck. It is the one that remembers who the wine is actually for, and builds every story so it can travel all the way there, intact, through every pair of hands in between.
Your wine ends its life in a glass, held by a person, on an ordinary evening. Market like that person exists. Right now almost nobody in the room does, and that gap is the opening.
If you want help building story material that survives the relay, from the buyer's one sticky sentence to the card on the drinker's table, that is the work we do at Wine with Margot. Bring me your wine and the three walls it has to cross, and we will build a story strong enough to make the whole trip.
People also ask
Any questions related to this topic? Maybe you can find your answer here. Click here!
Why is wine marketing aimed at the trade and not the consumer?
Because of how wine reaches the shelf. In most markets, and by law in the United States, a winery sells to a distributor, who sells to a retailer or restaurant, who sells to the drinker. On paper the winery's direct customer is the distributor, so marketing budgets get built to win over distributors, sommeliers, and importers. The drinker sits two tiers away and rarely gets addressed at all.
What is the three-tier system in wine?
The three-tier system is the legal structure, standard in the United States, that separates alcohol producers, distributors, and retailers into distinct businesses. A winery must sell to a licensed distributor, who sells to a licensed retailer or restaurant, who sells to the public. It means most wineries never sell directly to the person drinking their wine, which is why so much wine marketing points at the middle tier instead of the drinker.
How can a winery market directly to the end consumer?
Through the channels it fully owns and that sit outside the three-tier wall: its own website, email newsletter, and social media. These are the only places a winery can speak to the drinker without a distributor or retailer editing the message down. Direct-to-consumer sales, tasting rooms, and wine clubs also let a winery build a relationship with the actual drinker rather than only the buyer.
Why doesn't my wine's story reach the customer even when it gets listed?
Because the story has to be relayed through people who did not write it and have little time to re-tell it. A distributor rep passes a fraction of it to a sommelier, who passes a fraction of that to the guest. Each handoff strips the story down until the drinker hears almost none of it. The fix is to build a story short and sticky enough to survive being retold, and to hand every link in the chain material designed to be passed on.
What is the single most useful thing to fix first?
Write one sentence about your wine so clear and memorable that a busy rep or sommelier repeats it without effort. If your entire origin story cannot be compressed into a single line a stranger would relay accurately, it will not make it through the chain. That one sentence is the smallest, highest-leverage piece of story material you can build.
Resources
- https://winesvinesanalytics.com/features/article/189049/The-Challenge-of-Distributor-Consolidation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Wines & Vines / Wine Business Analytics, The Challenge of Distributor Consolidation: the US went from roughly 1,800 wineries and more than 3,000 distributors in 1995 to more than 9,200 wineries and fewer than 1,200 distributors today, so the producers multiplied while the gatekeepers shrank by two thirds.
- https://winemarketcouncil.com/press-release-consumer-solutions-to-reduce-wine-purchasing-barriers-wmc-webinar-reveals-survey-results/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Wine Market Council, Consumer Solutions to Reduce Wine Purchasing Barriers: reducing the barriers that stop people buying wine was named members' number one research priority for 2025, with 70 percent citing health and a large share of occasional drinkers reporting that wine shopping feels intimidating.
- https://www.svb.com/globalassets/library/uploadedfiles/wine/svb-state-of-the-us-wine-industry-report-2025.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Silicon Valley Bank, State of the US Wine Industry 2025: US wine volume slid to around 329 million cases in 2025 and roughly half of wineries rated their own year negatively.
Margot van Lieshout
Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.
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