The Only Hope For Small and Medium Three-Tier Wine Brands is Technology

It's all on you wineries. You can't count on your wholesalers.

Every small and medium-sized (and many large) wine producer in America that is working through the three-tier system to distribute wines in various markets knows for a fact they can’t count on their wholesalers to market their products and do the heaving lifting needed to find the accounts most likely to take an interest in their wines. It’s a fact of modern wine marketing that wholesalers, particularly the duopolists at the top of the wholesale chain, have put the burden on suppliers to build the brand and generate orders.

For most small and medium-sized wineries, whether imports or domestic, this often means visiting far-off markets and working it themselves. And it means pleading with their wholesalers in those markets to show their wines to accounts; any accounts. It means begging their wholesaler for market insights such as which accounts are best suited for their products, which of their competitors are taking shelf space, and which restaurants have yet to make their seasonal orders that match their product lines.

Once the wineries are done pleading with their wholesaler to provide just a little help, the realization hits that they must do all this work themselves, then spoon-feed the intelligence, if they can get any themselves, to the reps who were supposed to be able to provide them with this information.

One of the companies solving this problem for supplies is Somm AI with their remarkable AI-driven technology that removes the veil completely that has long covered the on-premise wine marketplace. By using publicly available, though extraordinarily difficult to obtain, information on wine lists that sits on restaurant websites, Somm AI is giving 20/20 clarity to its clients on restaurant wine placements across the country, across states, and down to restaurants in cities and towns.