Wine critics are like lavatory paper

Soft, strong, and very, very long. No, not really. But they are just as effective as loo roll at selling wine

With a paid subscription you gain full access to the written and audio archive, these weekly business insights, bonus content and my eternal gratitude. At less than £2.00 a week, these revenue-generating insights are the best value wine business advice on the internet. Paid subscribers keep this Substack coming into your inbox too. If you’re in a position to pay for writing you value (mine or anyone else’s), please consider doing it. Your support makes such a difference to writers.

This is a picture from Petaluma Market in Napa, California. It’s a grocery and wine store and one of the places I bought wine when I was working at Pix last year.

The picture comes courtesy of Paul Mabray, the CEO of Pix. He took it when he was looking for something to buy last week. “If everything has a shelf talker, nothing stands out” he said. He’s absolutely right.¹

Shelf talkers talk. Obviously. But not how you think. Or at least not how this store thinks. We know this thanks to a drinks trade executive called Mark Aylwin in the UK.

Knowing how shelf talkers work - and how we know how they work - is invaluable to wine companies of any size, throughout the wine business.

Now Mark isn’t really a wine guy. He’s a grocer. A career grocer. A very successful career grocer. He was for several years a senior executive at the supermarket brand Safeway, working with the stores on how to increase wine sales.

The teams in the stores told him that wines would always sell best if they had little shelf talkers, sometimes called shelf barkers, with discount offers on them. Like this.