How do the Great Winemakers Sell?

Intriguing view of selling.  Works if you already have the established brand equity: real, bought  or imagined.

Should You Ignore What Your Customers Want? The Great Winemakers Do.
Rather than follow consumer taste, they push it in a new direction.

Based on the research of: 
Ashlee Humphreys, Gregory Carpenter  at Kellogg

A wine expert guides a consumer in a shopping cart through a river of wine, to a particular group of bottles.  Michael Meier

Among French wines, Château Pétrus is legendary. Consumers pay over $1,000 for a single bottle. Talking with Christian Moueix, the owner and long-time winemaker of Pétrus, Kellogg’s Gregory Carpenter asked an innocent question: When crafting a wine, how do you think about the consumer?
Taken aback, the vintner paused, leaned back, and opened his eyes wide. “He said, ‘I don’t! I make what pleases me,’” recalls Carpenter, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School.

That may come as a surprise to those who think that winning customers requires exhaustive surveys and precise analytics to discover what people want. Yet this consumer-skeptic attitude is common among winemakers. “They suspect that consumers don’t really appreciate and respect wine,” says Carpenter, “so there’s no point asking them what they think.”

But from a business point of view, that presents a challenge: How do you create devoted customers and turn a profit if you essentially ignore what customers want?

Winemakers are not the only ones facing this quandary. Marketing scholars have a term—“market-driving firms”—for businesses that, rather than reacting to consumer tastes, attempt to influence those tastes to their advantage. But prior research on market-driving firms has focused on high-tech innovators like Apple and Tesla. These companies shape consumer preferences by introducing unprecedented products and services, which often render the competition obsolete. As Steve Jobs famously stated: “Our job is to figure out what [customers] are going to want before they do.”

Carpenter wanted to know how a company can influence consumers without a disruptive new technology to offer. So, working with Ashlee Humphreys, an associate professor of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern’s Medill School, he turned to the wine industry. “Winemaking hasn’t changed in thousands of years,” Carpenter says.   .... "

Fake Wines (and other drinks/foods/products?)

Can complex, pricey wines be replicated far more cheaply by recreating them with equivalent mixtures of tastes using chemistry?  A similar approach was used when we analyzed component green coffees in blends for well known tastes and interactions.  We essentially we did this by using AI and optimization based analysis of blends to find taste equivalent results.  Verified by professional tasting.  So were these fakes, or reasonable equivalence to human abilities to taste?   We called it good business. Good piece with interesting commercial implications.  This is also done in other non-food businesses too, like the formulation and manufacture of paints.  The human interaction with the product can now be done in more precise ways than before.

Also consider: Counterfeit goods detection via machine learning.

Your Next Glass of Wine Might be a Fake --- and You'll Love it.  In Wired. by Bruce Schoenfeld.

Replica Wine makes cheaper copies of your favorite wine at a discount by analyzing its chemistry. Often, even professional critics can't tell the difference. Is this heresy or just good business?

" ... Over the past four years, Ellipse has analyzed thousands of wines, a formidable chunk of the American marketplace. More than anyone else, it is safe to say, the IBG team can scientifically define what the most popular wines taste like. “Only we, uniquely, have this data to say, ‘If you like Goldeneye, we know exactly why you like Goldeneye,’” Walker says about a California Pinot Noir that IBG will soon be trying to replicate. “And we know what else you’re likely to like. And what you won’t.”

IBG can’t replicate every wine. Those with singular attributes, like wines made from grapes grown in a specific vineyard or from a hard-to-find variety, are far more difficult, bordering on impossible, for the simple reason that all of IBG’s wines start with those surplus lots being sold on the bulk market. When I ask Zimmerman if they could replicate a small-batch Shiraz from a producer in Australia’s Adelaide Hills that is a particular favorite of mine, he rolls his eyes and says there’s no way.

But the world’s most popular wines—from Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay to Dom Perignon—are made hundreds of thousands of bottles at a time, enough volume that their grapes are sourced from a range of vineyards. “The reason K-J is so successful,” Hicks says about Kendall-Jackson, “is that it tastes consistent, year after year, bottling after bottling. You know what you’re going to get, like Coca-Cola or Campbell’s soup.” If Kendall-Jackson is using what seems like a fairly exact recipe to make each vintage of its wines, Hicks figures, there’s no reason that IBG, with its reams of scientific data, can’t match it. .... "