East Coast Ecommerce Success Story: Early Mountain Vineyards, Virginia

So many wineries contracted their DTC offerings this past year, and understandably so. It's been one of the most challenging commercial environments that most of us can remember.

That's why I'm particularly excited to spotlight Early Mountain Vineyards this week, in Madison County, Virginia, as our end-of-year series continues to highlight Enolytics' colleagues and ecommerce clients.

While many hospitality endeavors contracted their offerings this past year, Early Mountain expanded. It's an East Coast ecommerce success story, and they shared the love.

Early Mountain added a new wine club, for example, called Taste of Virginia, that features site-specific or innovative bottlings from throughout the Commonwealth, often winemakers' side projects. "Instead of focusing on perks and discounts, we shifted mindset toward valuing access to cool wines and support of innovation and young winemakers," said Aileen Sevier, VP of Strategy and Marketing at Early Mountain.

They also added fun holiday items (like a gift guide and holiday host pack) and they expanded their corporate gift giving initiatives in order to build on their virtual tasting success from earlier in the year. Enolytics' analytics tool helped them to target likely customers for their Club and corporate gifting outreach.

Here's a little more detail from Aileen for the East Coast perspective on ecommerce success, to add to Scott Harvey Wines in Amador County, California and Mira Winery's in Napa.

What has been your biggest pain point this year?
There have been so many changing preferences, expectations, and consumer behaviour in 2021! I don't feel like I have the same clear insights on the past year as I had with 2020. Our guests continued to connect deeply with Early Mountain and Virginia wine, but what guests were looking for kept shifting. As a winery, we were balancing wanting to provide a relaxing escape with keeping everyone safe and our staff supported and secure. It was a year in which we deeply appreciated the team who continued to learn, grow and respond with us, while also feeling the pressure of a constricted labor pool. It seemed that those committed to service collectively questioned the supremacy of the consumer and the adage "the consumer is always right" while the consumer felt more entitled when ordering or visiting.

What has been your steepest learning curve?
The biggest challenge has definitely been planning though it was way better than 2020! From the bright hopes of normalcy in Spring 2021, we had to continue to dodge and weave throughout the year. From an ecommerce standpoint, it's been pretty incredible, though, as we have new comfort with ordering wine online combined with a wider array of ways to introduce new offerings, both online and in person. We also learned an incredible amount from 2020 and were able to ease off some of the deepest incentives while also having the flexibility to better target push periods to the spring and fall and more thoughtfully plan our releases.

What is your brightest hope for 2022?
I hope for a bit of stability. There are so many areas where we can't wait to put some focus and prioritize better consumer relationship management and better storytelling. We want to continue to engage wherever our consumers are looking for wine content and have a plan to launch a TikTok channel with engaging wine information. We are pushing more into video content as well as some longer form writing. We've engaged heavily with podcasts in 2021 and I want to bring together that content and better distribute it in 2022. We have ambitious e-commerce goals and this channel is being aggressively budgeted and supported so we need to get even more creative in the year ahead.