We’re grateful to Bree Boskov MW and the organizers of last week’s Oregon Wine Symposium for their invitation to discuss our findings about the Oregon “slice” of DTC data, as sourced from WineDirect.

Normally Cathy travels to conferences and I stay behind the scenes but this time, since we received two invitations for the same week, she fell on her sword and went to Paris. I headed west to Portland, slides in hand and happy to share our findings with the audience.

More than 100 wine professionals gathered in the audience (no pressure!) and it was clear to me that they were there to learn about using data to grow their businesses. The session ended with so many great questions that we ran out of time. We could have kept going for a much longer Q&A period.

Here were some highlights.

• We spent a small part of our session pointing out some differences between Oregon and the entire US in terms of Net Sales, Discounts, Average Bottle Price, etc.

• We talked about how Q4 was a rough quarter for all wine regions in the US. All of them decreased compared to Q4 2021.

Lesley Berglund, from WISE Academy, moderated our session and asked us to look at wine industry trends through a less traditional lens. Challenge accepted! Which is why we looked next at Gender and Generation.

• Most of our findings for Oregon apply to all the US. Notably, women over index as consumers of Oregon wine compared to the rest of the nation.

• Women consumers of Oregon wine also over index within the younger generations. Just as in the rest of the nation, women tend to buy more white, rosé and sparkling wine than men. Since those wines are generally less expensive than red wine, women overall tend to have a lower AOV than men.

• We also observed that women as buyers are are a growing group. Five years ago, the balance of men and women buying wine was closer to 60/40 in favor of men. In 2022, that ratio is closer to 50/50, and it’s a trend we see continuing for the foreseeable future.

Thank you again, Oregon, for the invitation to participate in the Symposium.

If your regional or membership organization would like a similar analysis, please be in touch. Any questions in general, reach out to me at chris@enolytics.com

—Chris Huyghe