Come rain or come a global pandemic, alcohol sales have always stayed pretty solid. And wine is a big part of that.
- In 2021, the global wine business accounted for $489.3 billion and is estimated to hit $825.5 billion by 2030.
Even large luxury conglomerates are taking note, as the likes of LVMH ramp up their acquisitions of historic vineyards in Napa, which we looked at earlier this week.
Suffice to say, competition between wineries is high and to keep ahead of it, companies need to do more to keep consumers engaged.
Moreover for a winery like Chateau Montelena, where a single bottle of wine is priced anywhere from $45 to $200, the stakes are even higher since customers tend to expect more when they spend more.
We spoke to Matt Crafton, the head winemaker who oversees production at Chateau Montelena, and he gave us a few keys to the 19th-century winery’s success.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
On staying independent
There’s a combination of things behind the brand’s success. The first piece of it is definitely the culture. There’s a very delicate balance between artistic independence and creativity on the one side, and then straight-up American dedication and grit. You can see how they could lead to some sort of strife, potentially, but they’re actually really complimentary. In our case, we have a lot of freedom to explore terms of how we make the wines, there’s nothing regimented. [Despite the influence of conglomerates], we’ve been 100% true to who we are from the beginning…We miss a lot of the trends, so to speak, because we live outside it, but I think the way we look at it is it’s better to be outside of it and to set our own trends than it is to live and die by what’s going on in the market currently. Setting ourselves outside of the mainstream has been a good move to not only keep us relevant, but to give us that sense of outsized influence.
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On the target customer
People are attracted to this brand for a lot of different reasons. Part of it is because we have that historical perspective, we have the Judgment of Paris [a wine competition organized in Paris in 1976], the history of putting the New World on the wine map. That attracts a certain kind of customer, a lot of people who are just learning about wine, and they read books on that, on the history of wine, they find their way to us, we also attract a lot of collectors. There’s usually some sort of personal connection for the person…So, it always reflects this place... like The wine that they have can never be copied and can never be repeated. Again, we couldn’t make it again, even if we wanted to. So I think it’s the combination of those things, whether it’s the kind of the story of the brand and what it stands for—a small American upstart brand.
On what’s next
We’re not planning to grow in volume at all; we’re very happy where we are. I can still taste every barrel in the cellar. That’s really important. We like being small and nimble. I think our growth is going to come in new markets. Expanding internationally is really going to be a big focus of ours, and then just continuing to up our game on the quality side.