Wineries Unlimited

One of the things that we heard when we visited our area wineries was about the importance of marketing. At that time, we were focused on learning viticulture and enology so it was surprising to hear so much mention of marketing from our seasoned winemakers. To address a little of this blackhole of deficit in our knowledge we attended the full day workshop at Wineries Unlimited hosted by Elizabeth Slater and Gary Finnan called Winery DIY.
Elizabeth Slater and Gary Finnan are an engaging tag team and their presentation's theme was about "Envision, Re-vision and Re-vive". I loved when Elizabeth said that "Grapes are a gateway drug, it leads to wine." Currently, there are 8045 wineries in North America so differentiation is key. How do we make ourselves stand out. They have a neat acronym called DNA:

• Discover
• Nurture
• Act

Their other message was about connecting the back of the house, the business (BX) with the front of the house, the customers (CX), but above all, be authentic.
We also went to the Trade Show where we ran into Sebastian from Mercier. Over lunch with Sebastian he brought us up to date on how our tall vines are doing. One thing that Sebastian noticed about our tall vines compared to the regular grafts and grafts that were 20 inches in height was that they produced much more foliage during the summer of 2012. We think that this is because of the carbohydrates stored in the lengthy trunk which in our case is rootstock (101-14 MGT).
After lunch, we looked at corks from various vendors:

And you cannot believe the choices there are for bottles:

We also visited vendors who had tanks, trellising material, label makers, and many more. There was a vendor selling a machine that would turn your wine into a frozen drink. Interesting! Then it was time to head out the door and back on the road for the trip home.