'It's a visiton thing' -The US Wine Vision Conference

摘要

The American wine industry held its Wine Vision Conference in Sonoma at the end of July, where I was the opening speaker. The subtitle of the conference was 'The Great Awakening'. The idea was to wake the wine industry to wider appeals to grow the number of wine drinkers in the United States. Currently the US has a very small proportion of regular wine drinkers, estimated at about 12 per cent of the adult population, while Australia and the UK have approximately 30 per cent of adults drinking wine on some regular basis. Of course, 12 per cent of 270 million people is a very large number of wine drinkers, but the industry has been working to grow this percentage for the past several years with only limited success. As a member of the planning committee for the Australian Wine Marketing Conference, I found this conference both enlightening and frustrating. The enlightening part focused on other industries, specialty retailing and new consumer segments. The conference was a bit frustrating when the different parts did not mesh very well, and when the keynote speaker did not relate very specifically to the wine sector.