Do you need a trust fund to drink wine?

In part three of the Wine Marketing Masterclass we look at who spouts this nonsense. And who actually drinks wine, and why.

Is it “posh” to drink wine? Or at least middle-class?

That’s what we’re looking at in this, the third session from The Wine Marketing Masterclass. A new weekly series for anyone who sells or markets wine. Or for students of the WSET Diploma, Master of Wine, or BA, MA, or MBA courses in wine.

There are around 50 of these insights. Some in videos (I’ll post those for free) and some in posts. All following the structure of an MBA course in marketing, only totally focussed on wine. And frankly rather more fun, and MUCH better value.

There’s a bit for free, then the real meat for subscribers.

Remember, everyone who subscribes gets:

• a complementary one-to-one session with me online

• group sessions once a month where we talk about anything and everything wine-marketing-related

• access to all the older posts plus the Substack archive

What’s not to love?

So… back to our question, is it “posh” to drink wine. Or at least middle-class?

There was a time - say in the USA - where to drink wine was, in the words of the sociologist Thor­stein Veblen, to be:

a con­nois­seur of cred­it­able vi­ands and beverages

But today around a third of the US adult pop­u­la­tion drinks wine. That’s somewhere between 70 and 80 mil­lion people. Now they’re not en­tirely rep­res­ent­at­ive of the US population as a whole. They’re more likely to be wo­men and white for in­stance. But they do cut across a far wider in­come and so­cial demo­graph­ic than we perhaps think. 

But the idea that wine is some­thing for the elite is per­sist­ent. In fact it’s something that the wine busi­ness it­self some­times seems to pro­mote. Take this from a UK retailer’s web­site.

Just a minute.

Who ever said you do need a trust fund or a private education to enjoy wine? Do we really believe this?

The hon­est truth is that the Brit­ish pub­lic don’t be­lieve this. (Or at least they didn’t believe it un­til a wine mer­chant told them.)

Wine is ar­gu­ably the most demo­crat­ic drink in the UK. 

Wine is the UK’s most pop­u­lar al­co­hol­ic bever­age. Its pop­ular­ity ex­tends to every geographic re­gion and every age group co­hort. It’s been said for many years now that you’re more likely to find a bottle of wine in a Brit­ish fridge than a pack­et of butter. We know this thanks to Wine Drinkers UK.

While wine is the most pop­u­lar al­co­hol­ic drink in the UK, only two and a half per­cent of Chinese adults are monthly wine drink­ers. Even so thanks to the vast size of China, that means China has a pop­u­la­tion of monthly wine drink­ers sim­il­ar to the UK and US. 

The im­port­ant takeaway is the sense… the market ori­ent­a­tion if you like… that wine is enjoyed by mil­lions of people, in a very dif­fer­ent way to those of us in the wine business. We are the ones who think it is elitist. We are the ones telling people you need a trust fund and private education to enjoy wine. 

Now, we are go­ing to get into the tac­tic­al ele­ments of the mar­ket­ing mix a bit later. That’s product, price, pro­mo­tion, and place. 

But it’s worth jump­ing ahead to an ex­ample – in this case from pro­mo­tion. And this example illustrates how a bet­ter mar­ket­ing ori­ent­a­tion has a dir­ect in­flu­ence on the way we can work as wine mar­keters, sales people, communicators, and influencers.

Yes… coming up next you’ll see a case study in outstanding wine marketing. With hard data and real-world insights you can use straight away. A subscription gives you an MBA-level journey through wine marketing - invaluable if you’re a practising marketer, in sales, doing your WSET Diploma, Master of Wine, or BA, MA, or MBA programme.