How Data Tells the Story of Wine

Summer! Officially!

Time for long weekends, beach reads, and cool, refreshing drinks in our glass.

So it totally “fit” to be working on a project this week about sparkling wine.

The idea was to get a baseline understanding of consumer behavior around sparkling wine. By consumer behavior, we mean things like the categories that consumers are rating highly; the occasions that consumers are celebrating, and their everyday sentiment toward bubbles too; and the performance of Prosecco versus Champagne versus Cava, as well as the best-performing markets for each.

It’s been a lot of fun, and incredibly interesting too to dig into the details of those queries.

What also became clear is how much more can be done.

One thing we’re beginning to see is the value that non-wine-focused data can also add to a project like this.

It’s like doing the research to write a compelling story. As we develop the narrative to get us to the end goal, we see what other sources of information can help to flesh out the plotline. Socio-economic data, for example, tells us things like what kind of house the consumer lives in and what sort of income they’re bringing home. Detailed geo-located weather data describes the scenery and atmosphere around a consumer’s behavior at a specific time of year, like a hot, sunny holiday weekend when searches and scans spike for sparkling wine. And etc.

The point is that these data streams help to sketch in the profile of the consumer, and they provide the context for their behavior involving particular styles of wine.

Data might seem very binary and very zeros-and-ones. But there’s a tremendous amount of creativity involved, too, in using the data to create the narrative that answers the questions the client needs to know.

Enjoy this long Memorial Day weekend, and thank you as always for reading –