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Study Has Nothing to Offer Winery Hospitality—So, Keep Smiling Maybe wineries ought to encourage their tasting room hospitality workers to tell customers exactly what they think of them (and not smile so much). According to a report on a study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology researchers found: “a link between those who regularly faked or amplified positive emotions, like smiling, or suppressed negative emotions — resisting the urge to roll one’s eyes, for example — and heavier drinking after work

Firstleaf and the First Rule of Wine Marketing—Tell The Truth I’ve been tough on the Natural Wine category in the past. I think I may have called its champions “charlatans” and labeled them “frauds”

On Wine Marketing—Be the Winery that Champions your AVA Be that future as it may, one thing I do know is that with 10,000 wineries, each vying or the attention of the active, serious and committed wine lovers, it is more and more difficult for individual wineries to attract and hold on to their attention. So, I’m here to urge wineries to consider being the champion of their sub-appellation; to be the winery that educates about all things home turf; to be the advocate and endorser of that officially recognized region they call home. It’s entirely legitimate for a winery to be the champion of their own vineyards, to hold up “terroir” as a wine’s greatest object of illumination. If you consistently promote your AVA, if you promote your AVA in your media outreach, if you produce that educates on the AVA, if you put your spin on your AVA in your social media marketing and emails and mail pieces here’s what will happen, I guarantee: –You’ll be among the first the media calls when they profile the AVA -You’ll be the representative most often chosen to represent the AVA at tastings -You’ll have numerous stories to tell your customers that no one else is telling on a regular basis -You will engender significant goodwill with your neighbors and peers -You’ll be one of the go-to wineries when members of the trade are seeking to highlight your AVA on their lists or shelves.

In using the COLA (Certificate of Label Approval) database to track the changes in use of the various sub-AVAs in the Willamette Valley and the larger Willamette Valley AVA, what’s clear is that Oregonian vintners very rarely used both the sub-AVA and the larger Willamette Valley AVA on their labels. In a few cases, a wine labeled with a sub-AVA mentions the larger “Willamette Valley” AVA on its back label copy, but this isn’t so much to identify the larger AVA but to place the sub-AVA or a vineyard in a larger context. That the wines and grapes from the smaller, nested Willamette Valley sub-AVAs are more valuable than wines and grapes that carry the larger Willamette Valley AVA could be demonstrated by the price per ton that is paid for grapes with a sub-AVA provenance versus the price per ton paid for grapes with the larger Willamette Valley AVA. In their 2018 Harvest Report on average prices offered per ton for different AVAs on their website, you see a clear “sub-appellation premium” for Pinot Noir grapes offered in each sub-AVA versus Pinot Noir Grapes that carry the larger Willamette Valley AVA.