There are plenty of wineries, especially in Europe, that have long operating history and family tradition in core of their communication. I recently had a very interesting discussion about the communication, with a representative of one of the wineries of that kind.

What it proves if you have a long operating history and tradition? At least that you have been in the business for a long time. Well, you could say that things have been done in the right way quite a couple of times if you have managed to keep your business running for, let’s say hundreds of years. But let’s be honest about it. If we think about the long operating history alone, that tells not much about the competitiveness of the producer or the wines in modern business. You could have had a founder that was a very long-sighted person with a good sense of future; bought a vineyard and maybe put a chateau or winery in a right place. Since then, if the vineyard was good enough, the company may have been operated by subsequent generations not putting too much effort into updating the strategy, polishing the processes or adding any new thinking to the box. With the good source of grapes and fair effort in winemaking (is enough here, believe me), the consumer demand in increasing market has taken care of pulling the wines to the markets. Oops, doing that by generations after generations, here they are, explaining how fantastic winery they are after 10 generations of learning, innovation, cumulated know how and so on.

Of course I am exaggerating a bit, and on the other side there are the producers that can be considered the leading ones, that actually have been in the business for several generations and have made progress year after year.  But, the issue is that there are also much younger wineries that have managed to find and fight for their position in today’s circumstances. This may have been achieved by for example very innovative new concept or communication method or by doing the “usual” things such as winemaking or customer service in such an efficient way, that it has allowed to overtake some of those in the business for a longer time.

Actually, the discussion about this was started by the other party in the table, representative of a winery with long family tradition. It was very interesting to hear. The issue was that it is highly critical for these kinds of traditional wineries to think about their communication and be careful about how they communicate the tradition and history. They may mean nothing for the consumer and actually work against them if stated as single arguments. Why would someone in business for hundred years be any better than let’s say, company that has emerged quite recently. The younger winery may have quickly proven its profitability by some years in operation and managed to position its wines into a level where they compete with those that are considered as the typical high quality examples of their region or style and boosted by communication about the producer’s long tradition.

I have personally experienced number of situations where it has been extremely difficult to find right arguments to communicate these more traditional wineries or wines for the end consumer. Especially so in situations where the winery has not considered its position from the consumers point of view. Luckily, there are several producers that have long history and lot of tradition, but who have managed to keep up with the innovation and developed their business to compete with modern arguments. In these cases, it is actually very inspiring to state that “and by the way, we have done this for several hundreds of years”.

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