The study noted that metropolitan area, liquor sales volume (a proxy for total sales volume), and cuisine type accounted for more than half of the variation observed in wine sales. The average Chicago and Miami restaurant in the study sold approximately twice as much wine as the California and Las Vegas restaurants. Surprisingly, the New York metropolitan area restaurants in the study averaged half the wine sales of those in California and a quarter of the wine sales of those in Chicago or Miami. Steak houses, seafood restaurants, and American restaurants sold approximately 25% more wine than Italian and French restaurants. Asian restaurants sold only a third of the wine sold in the average steak house in the survey.

These results have significant implications for wineries. Most important, wineries can use these results to target their sales efforts towards restaurants that sell the most wine. This will make the sales process more efficient. Wineries can also evaluate the effectiveness of the restaurant menu in selling wine, based on the results of the survey. Additionally, wineries can use this information to evaluate the effectiveness of their broker and distributor partners, as well as their direct sales force.

Using this type of information effectively can help wineries succeed in today’s challenging economic environment. With the growth of the internet, a tremendous volume of information is available at no cost to wineries that know how to find and separate relevant data from irrelevant information. The wineries that survive and ultimately thrive will successfully create small advantages in their business strategy using this type of information and then execute relentlessly and with discipline against their strategies. These wineries will be positioned to maximize their sales and profits when the business climate improves.

The paper focuses in on Facebook and Twitter for B to C social networking and Linkedin for B to B social networking. It highlights these sites as the best high-traffic SNS’s to put your resources behind. I agree with their logic and their selections, including eliminating MySpace when bandwidth is an issue.

Also included are in-depth profiles of a number of Wine-Social sites including Adegga, CellarTracker, Cork’d, Snooth, VinCellar by Vinfolio and WineLog. Though the list is incomplete, forms are made available for those missing wine-social sites that want to be included going forward. Personally, I would have included Wine.Meetup but I’m sure that they will get added to the list in the future. The message is to “pick a pew” where your highest concentration of customers and prospects reside, map out a strategy and get busy generating content and building “buzz”.

In their purest form, Social Networks are all about connecting with people you know and keeping them informed of what you are doing. Activity is in the forefront and connections are secondary. Social networking sites work well for announcing wine events and for publishing digital media after the events. Before you jump in thinking that Facebook is the ticket to selling out your inventory consider the etiquette appropriate for social media marketing.

It takes time to build and deploy your social network for marketing purposes. While you are considering how you might leverage your friends and associates on Facebook and on other social networks be prepared and write up a plan. This is, after all, your network of friends so let your wine do the talking via tasting events with candid photos and videos that don’t look staged (Fun is infectious).

Importantly, you don’t want to garishly broadcast your sales and marketing messaging as you would with traditional advertising, but rather create the environment where friends influence friends. Join the conversation but don’t attempt to dominate or force your friends to say what you want to hear. By all means recruit content creators and editors and encourage photos and (short) videos that you can put on your site and publish on Flickr and YouTube (According to “The Global Web Index,” from Trendstream, with research conducted by Lightspeed Research, early this year 72% of US Internet users watched video clips monthly—making video bigger than blogging or social networking).

Your social site should grow organically with a little cultivation and by getting to know your friends who visit your tasting room, attend your events, sign up for your wine clubs and enjoy chronicling and sharing the social experiences/events they participate in along with the great wines you make.

For some restaurants, this situation will result in permanent changes in their business, creating opportunities for wineries who respond appropriately to these changes. Recognizing what restaurants will be buying when they replenish their wine inventories and having the appropriate product to satisfy this demand will be critical for capitalizing on these opportunities. Targeting the best restaurants and having the means to present their products to these restaurants will also be necessary to leverage the situation, as will educating the wait staff on the benefits of wines that reach restaurant menus.

Wineries must deal with other changes as well. Distributors can be expected to reduce their restaurant sales staffs in response to the decline in restaurant sales, making it harder for wineries to rely on distributors to push their products into restaurants. Retailers can be expected to buy more wine, but their price points will decline as they react to changes in consumer demand patterns. Retailers will try to offset the decline in average unit prices by pressing wineries and distributors for longer margins on items they sell.

In times like these, wineries would do well to remember the close relationship between danger and opportunity. Making good business decisions about deploying appropriate resources in support of a well thought out business strategy that takes into account the current realities of the market will result in new opportunities and new growth for wineries. The dangers wineries face revolve around their abilities to identify the right strategy and desired outcomes, to assemble the necessary resources, and to monitor the application of resources to achieve the outcomes.