In her three years as president of one of the leading U.S. wine marketing research groups, Liz Thach has seen plenty of industry dips. But, as she ends her tenure as president of the Wine Market Council, she sees reasons to expect those slumps to turn around.
“It seems like there’s a cycle every seven years,” says Thach, talking about the so-called Turrentine Brokerage wine business wheel of fortune, which uses historical events to predict future wine business trends. “And if you look at the cycle, we’ve had two downturns since 2000 about every seven years, where we’ve had too many grapes. So you can look at this downturn as part of the cycle, and if we’re at the bottom now, and I think we are, I see a distinct possibility that in the next 3 to 5 years we won’t have enough grapes and the current cycle will turn to shortage again, as it has in the past.”
This is not to say that Thach – whose many credits include a PhD and MW, as well as being the Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Wine and Management at Sonoma State University in California wine country – underestimates the various factors and complexities feeding into the current wine downturn in the U.S. After all, she has the numbers, studies, and statistics to prove it from her time at the marketing council.
Rethinking the consumer base
But Thach has also seen, through much of the work done during her time running the council, that wine can expand its audience in the U.S. to consumers who have not traditionally been wine drinkers. That includes pioneering studies done by the council and its director of research, Christian Miller, that examined the Hispanic, Asian-American, and African-American demographic groups long overlooked by the mainstream wine business. The goal of these studies was to determine why they weren’t drinking wine like the older, mostly white demographic that has dominated consumption, and what could be done to attract those groups to wine.
And, Thach says, the study results should help U.S. wine producers and marketers work to include those specific demographic groups in future advertising and promotions.
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