I ask myself more and more why in Italy there are no reports on the DTC, as in the USA or Australia for example. Then of course I also give myself the answer, and it is that the wine industry simply does not collect the data. There are dozens of reports and analyzes, all aimed at producers and distributors completely forgetting the behavior and habits of consumers. Few reports on the wine DTC.
The DTC report
Of course some companies that deal with wine e-commerce and digitalization of the wine industry have noticed the problem; in this post I will report a summary of the 2022 report on Enotourism and DTC in Italy published by Divinea, a company specializing in digital services for the wine sector and wine tourism. They developed a CRM and marketing platform called Wine Suite, whose data was used to produce the report in question.
As they describe at the beginning of the document, the sample size is certainly not huge, but obviously they can only be based on the data in their possession. Part of the report was made with interviews with 129 wineries, not necessarily and not just their customers.
Of course, the data refer to 2021. It can be a good start to get a clearer picture of the wine DTC in Italy. However, I leave you the link here to download the report.
Wine Tourism market value: Napa € 2B, France € 5B, Italy € 2,7B
Visitors yearly : Napa 3,9M, France 10M, Italy 15M
DTC Sales : Napa 70%, France 30%, Italy 10%
Digital insight : Napa °°°, France °°, Italy °
As in the report on the DTC in the USA published by Sovos and Wine Vines Analytics, also in Italy the DTC channel is mainly used by small wineries.
The report shows a portrait of the wineries very little able to exploit the information and above all to retrieve it. The Italian wine business does not know how to use digital channels. The result is a profile where the direct relationship between winery and consumer is practically non-existent; only 11% of companies claim to produce half of their earnings from the DTC channel, 12% do not use email or direct messaging systems, or any telephone orders. Nearly 40% do not even sell through fairs and events.
Facts
21% do not collect any data
30.4% use paper sheets
26.1% use datasheets
22.4% use a professional CRM
and 94% of wineries collect visitors' email addresses but:
31% do not use it for sale
40% sell less than 10% with this channel
The reasons are disarming: they have no time or tools, they have never thought about it, they do not think it is useful.
How much do cellar sales affect total DTC sales?
But probably no one has ever explained to Italian wineries the usefulness of the data for the wine DTC. Only 40% use an existing or proprietary e-commerce, and the rest are either evaluating or believing it is not strategic for their company:
44% of wineries invest less than € 200 per month for the development of the wine DTC
41.4% invest no budget
The visit to the cellar is also little used, therefore wine tourism, which could be the best channel for acquiring new customers; 50% of wineries say that most of their visitors buy wine, but in small quantities. And of course, returning to the subject of the data collected, almost no producer makes correlations between the bottles sold and the visitor data. But on the other hand, by not using marketing tools, no one can think of building customer segments.
The DTC channel in Italy could have a great potential for growing; the little average size of vineries (about 4 hectars) and a family management can’t help to develop this market. And it’s no accountability of winegrowers, they cannot work in the vineyard, in the cellar and also on the keyboard. But it needs a teaching about the great power that data analysis and email marketing have. I’m not speaking about Artificial Intelligence, or great Cloud Platform of Business Intelligence: it’s no rocket science, it’s only about building a mailing list. But, who are going to teach this to Italian wine growers?