Using Social Media to Promote an Underdog Wine

“Riesling rules!” That’s the message Shawn Bavaresco wanted to get out to the world six years ago when he and three partners founded their winery, Pacific Rim, in Portland, Ore. But it wasn’t until the company staged a social media campaign on Facebook that its message actually started to reach the public.

Pacific Rim has been producing affordable riesling wines since 2006, when Mr. Bavaresco and his partners struck out on their own after working for a larger winery in California. Their former employer had offered only one riesling, but the wine had performed well even though rieslings are considered something of an underdog in the industry. The partners decided to bet their new brand on a single type of wine. “We wanted to turn passive wine drinkers into riesling zealots,” Mr. Bavaresco said.

These days, the prized customer base in the wine industry is the millennial generation. According to The Wine Market Council’s annual report on the state of wine in the United States, older millennials (ages 26 to 34) are consuming wine with greater frequency and are highly experimental, with 89 percent trying unfamiliar brands frequently.

https://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/using-social-media-to-promote-an-underdog-wine/