Sips and Bytes - Alder Yarrow
Blending Wine, Words, Technology, and Customer Experience to Shape the Future of Our Industry
The wine industry is home to numerous talented and exciting individuals, yet it hosts only a few exceptional people. Alder Yarrow is one of those outstanding talents. He is the godfather of wine blogging at Vinography, a fantastic wine journalist at Jancis Robinson, and someone who understands the wine industry intimately, but he’s so much more. I’ve rarely met someone with extraordinary capacity in both his heart and head. Alder is a rare talent in our industry. He’s the intersection between wine and tech, and he has a firm grasp on the wonders of wine and a deep knowledge of marketing and digital tools. And the combination of all this knowledge fuels his superpower to imagine and build brilliant customer experiences. In fact, co-owned and operated the agency CIBO which was sold in 2018
What isn’t as apparent to the world is Alder’s magical ability to see magnetic north. He has an uncanny ability to see the right path forward, even when inconvenient. I had the absolute pleasure and privilege of working with him as one of our best Board of Advisors for Pix (and candidly for any company I’ve ever worked for). Internally, I called Alder “our mirror of truth.” He’s reflected our actual reality, regardless of the team’s self-talk. He was objective and complimentary about our successes and candid about improving our people, company, and platform. And while Alder’s intellectual horsepower is evident, so is his heartpower. His capacity for understanding and empathy puts him in the highest echelon of caring humans. He cares - about his work, our industry, and the people who power it. When you speak with Alder, you immediately feel two things - the calmness that he exudes and how thoughtful he is in every conversation - about the topic, the people, the impact, and you, the person he is talking with. He’s a champion of many good causes, from being one of the founders of the Glancy Wine Education Foundation to the architect and engine behind the Old Vine Registry and so much more. On top of all of this, he’s a dedicated father and husband. Candidly, I don’t know where he finds the time, but our industry and the world are better because of him.
I enjoyed learning more about him in this interview and sharing his thoughts with all of you.
How did you become interested in the intersection of wine and digital tools?
You could say that my whole professional career has pointed me towards the idea, even if it has only rarely given me the opportunity to consummate the union of the two.
Since 1996, I’ve been working in digital marketing and online user experience, first at agencies owned by other people and from 2005 until 2020 at agencies owned by myself and a couple of business partners. Those dates, you will note, parallel the rise of internet technologies themselves, from HTML 1.0 to Web3. I began my career with a focus on Information Architecture, which morphed into User Experience (UX), and then over the years, I developed specialties in Digital Product Strategy and Brand Experience/Customer Experience Strategy. My firm designed B2B and B2C digital experiences and strategies for Fortune 1000 brands around the world, including Tesla, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Cisco, Cypress Semiconductor, Franklin Templeton, Salesforce, SFMOMA, Subaru, Philips, and Union Bank.
So that takes care of the digital tools piece and the day job.
Now let’s talk about wine and the “night job.”
I’ve been writing about wine seriously since 2004 on my own site, Vinography.Com, which was one of the first wine blogs on the internet, and remains perhaps the most lauded. For the last 12 years I’ve been writing for Jancis Robinson on her web site. I judge wine competitions, speak at conferences, travel all over the world to taste, wrote a book, etc. etc. While it’s not a major source of income, and has always had to fit around the demands of the career that does provide the income, I take it pretty seriously.
Naturally, given both those sides of my life, I’ve had a keen interest in the intersection between these two domains, and have tried to lend my digital strategy expertise to topics in the wine world whenever the opportunity arises, whether that is speaking at conferences or writing occasional articles about the impact and implications of digital technologies on the wine world.
Oh, and then there’s always been lots of arguing on social media, especially with the dinosaurs who think that the wine industry can simply carry on the way they always have.
Could you share a noteworthy or exciting achievement or project at your company that excites you or is bragworthy?
Sadly, I’ve not had as many opportunities to apply my day job skills to the wine world as I would like, in part because my firm was expensive to work with, and few companies in the wine world could afford our services.
One notable piece of work at the intersection of digital and wine, however, was the complete strategy and design work to build the software platform Vincellar for the company Vinfolio. We conducted in-depth interviews with wine collectors of many stripes all over the US, and then used the insights gathered from that research to write the product requirements document, and then design the entirety of the application as well as develop the front-end code.
At the time it was the most sophisticated and usable wine cellar management software available.
It was immensely satisfying to use “both sides of my brain” on that project, and the platform was incredibly well received by users.
Name three wines you think are wonderful.
Here are three wines most people have never heard of that I think are fantastic.
2021 Jutta Ambrositsch “Kosmopolit” Gemischter Satz, Vienna, Austria
This young graphic designer-turned winemaker works in Vienna, where unlike almost anywhere else in the world, there is a large and thriving wine region within the city limits. Gemischter Satz wines were and are the typical wines of the Vienna appellation, made from a field blend of sometimes up to 20 or 30 different grape varieties. The wines are unique, delicious, and she designs all her own labels.
2022 Suertes del Marques “Trenzado” Listan Blanco, Canary Islands, Spain
Maybe, just maybe, in addition to being unbelievably delicious, this might be the single best wine value in the whole wide world. For less than $25 you can taste the spectacular alchemy of sea air, stark volcanic landscapes, and an ancient grape that sizzles with incredible acidity and citrus flavors. I can literally drink a whole bottle of this wine myself without any regrets.
2020 Gaia Estate Red Wine, Nemea, Greece
Most people when they think of Greek wine (if they think of it at all) shudder at the memory (or the reputation) of retsina, but there is so much more to Greek wine, including some amazing indigenous grape varieties. Made from the delicious (but hard to say) Agiorgitiko grape by one of the top winemakers in Greece, this light-to-medium bodied wine sings with bright berry fruit and a nice stony underbelly.
In your opinion, what makes the combination of wine and technology extraordinarily challenging?
There are two factors I think, one that is cultural and one that is domain specific. Culturally, the use of technology in wine has always been hampered by the fact that it is possible to start, run, and grow a very successful winery without having any real digital expertise in house. That is less true today, but certainly for many wineries that have been around for more than 10 years, they may have built very successful double-digit million dollar businesses without having invested in much more than a web site. There are few other industries in which you can grow and become that successful without having significant technology expertise in house. Consequently, however, the wine industry as a whole doesn’t look at digital technology as a core competency that must be invested in and grown, they look at it as an expense. That’s a massive cultural barrier that holds the wine industry back in a major way.
From a domain specific standpoint, there are some complexities in the wine business that make broader technology plays (across multiple players) much more difficult than in some other industries. Combine the incredible proliferation of SKUs (that are constantly changing year to year in terms of product data and quality), the complexities of the three-tier system, the nightmare of state-by-state alcohol shipping regulations, the intensely crowded marketplace of competitors, and the subjective nature of taste, and it can be quite challenging to build powerful and useful solutions that address the main challenges of a broad set of stakeholders, whether those be producers, distributors, retailers, trade, or consumers.
In your view, what is the most significant obstacle wineries face when leveraging digital tools?
The lack of resources within their organizations that have the applicable skills. If they invested in hiring people who really understood digital tools (which likely means hiring people without much wine industry experience—something that wine folks are often loathe to do) those people could help both develop strategies and execute them, as well as make the case for where those organizations need to invest in platforms to support those strategies. Without people who know what they’re doing that actually work for the winery, digital adoption (forget transformation for a moment) will always be more costly and less effective.
In your opinion, what makes the process of digital transformation particularly difficult?
I don’t want to repeat myself here, but the cultural dimension is the hardest part. Digital transformation is fundamentally about thinking and working a different way in any business, and that means people have to change. People don’t like change. We fear it. And so every digital transformation initiative is only ever as effective as the cultural change that goes along with it. I’ve seen plenty of digital transformations (at some pretty massive companies) fail because people weren’t on board and ready to change how they did business. That goes for both executives and people in the trenches. New ways of working aren’t easy to inculcate.
How has the digital landscape in the wine industry evolved over the past few years, and what trends do you foresee soon?
I should say to begin with that I primarily have visibility into the consumer facing side of the wine industry, and may not be aware of production-focused tech of note. That said, to be honest, the tech landscape has changed a lot less than I would have hoped over the past few years. Since the rise of services like Drizly (RIP), apps like Vivino, or platforms like Provi, all of which have been in the market for several years, I think we’ve seen very little innovation. That’s, of course, why I was so excited about the potential of a platform like Pix, but I’m really surprised there haven’t been more real digital innovations showing up for wine (and no I don’t count the dozens of useless taste-matcher, virtual sommelier apps out there).
In terms of trends, I’m quite bullish on the power of AI, and so I expect some interesting solutions to eventually be built with it, though at first they will likely be (sigh) apps that try to predict what wines I will like. But once we get past that noise, I expect some pretty interesting things to emerge in the e-commerce, CRM, content-generation, customer support & engagement, and supply chain space.
What are the key metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that wineries should be tracking to measure the success of their digital marketing efforts?
Oh boy. This could be a long discussion with a lot of “it depends” thrown in based on the specific nature of a winery’s business (e.g. the ratio of DTC to three-tier sales, the demographics of their customers, etc.) but for starters, here are a few off the top of my head.
Customer acquisition cost – how much it costs, on average, to acquire a new DTC customer or mailing-list signup
Follower growth – increase in number of social media followers
Engagement rate – level of interaction with your social media
Brand mentions on social media
Brand sentiment on social media
Conversion rate for each digital channel – what percentage of interactions result in new customers
Unique website visitors
Organic traffic vs purchased traffic
Bounce rate -- percentage of people who only look at 1 page of your site
Time on site and pages per session – how long are people staying on your site and how much content are they consuming
E-mail open rate
E-mail clickthrough rate
Time to respond to customer inquiry
Average order value
Note that above I’m providing the category of KPI, not the actual KPI, which needs to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, as well as aligned to the organizations overall strategy. E.g. Instead of “Unique website visitors” a proper KPI might be “Achieve a 20% increase to unique web site visitors from organic search in the next 6 months.”
There are obviously also a lot of KPIs around recurrent purchase rates, customer lifetime value, etc. that should be in the mix as well, along with a whole group of fairly technical SEO-related KPIs about the performance of your web site (page load times, etc.) but since your question was aimed specifically at digital marketing, I’m leaving those out for now.
What advice would you give to small or boutique wineries with limited resources that are looking to compete with larger wine producers in the digital space?
I’m not sure I agree with the implied premise of the question. If you’re a boutique winery, your competition in the digital space isn’t really larger wine producers. It’s other wineries at your size / scale / price that are targeting the same types of customers as you.
Competing for attention amongst your peers for attention requires dedicating the time and energy to do so. Someone has to do it. For small wineries with limited budget, that likely means the proprietor or winemaker – whoever is the face of the brand. If you can’t afford to hire someone to help you do social media and basic digital marketing, then you have to do it yourself.
And the formula for doing that is fairly straightforward. Figure out who your customers are (demographically, psychographically, and specifically) and then build a real relationship with them. Speak their language, engage with them, show up in places they care about. Follow the social accounts they follow. Work on issues they care about. Give them a window into your story and your business. Be authentic. Be transparent. Be gracious. If you’re not sure what to do, look at some small wineries that do a great job like Forlorn Hope, Massican, Two Shepherds, Extradimensional Wine Co. Yeah!, or Martha Stoumen.
Connect with your customers, and cherish every interaction. Respond to every comment. Reply to every e-mail. And do it with all the energy and enthusiasm you can muster.
I know that’s easy to say and hard to do. I’ve been a small business owner myself. The struggle is real. But in this day and age, not doing it isn’t an option.
If you owned a wine brand, what would be the first three things you would do to prepare your winery for digital success?
You mean besides hiring someone whose job it actually is to do this 😉 ?
Find out who my customers actually are, what they care about, and why they are my customer. This involves actually talking to them. Not sending surveys, not reading the e-mails that come in from the feedback form on the website, but actually calling hundreds of them on the phone and talking with them about what role my winery and our products played in their lives.
Install robust CRM and social listening technology and integrate it into everything we do, so that it is possible to understand exactly when and how we have interacted with each customer, what they have been up to (like visiting our web site, reading our e-mails, or liking our posts on social media), and what their purchase history is like. This would involve diligently building a customer database (and moving all customer information into it).
Invest in the tools, resources and processes to establish, maintain, and grow a set of high-quality digital assets that can and are utilized by the brand across channels. This means product, lifestyle, facility and people photography; product tech sheets, shelf talkers, etc.; and content about people, products, places, vintages, events, etc. Once those have been created, then they have to be proliferated across the winery’s extended brand footprint. Which is to say, not just on our web site, but with distributors, retailers, social media, in our branded materials, packaging, direct mail, partnerships, etc.
Next week on Sips & Bytes - Wine professor Magalie Dubois.