When I asked my Offset colleagues for reading and research recommendations, every single person pointed to the Silicon Valley Bank's Direct-to-Consumer Wine Report written by Rob McMillan, EVP & Founder of the bank's Wine Division. He's written this report every year for the last fifteen years. The strongest signal I took from the report is this line:
"When asked about plans for the year ahead, wineries responding to the survey tell us they are using the playbook from the past 30 years."
I read that and thought "holy shit, that's insane!"
Thirty years ago. That's almost ten years before the movie Sideways absolutely destroyed the merlot market. It's the year Dave Phinney fell in love with wine in Italy and began his epic journey. Thirty years! It makes me wonder how we have a wine industry at all right now.
Last week I came across Unlearn by Barry O'Reilly (highly recommended). The core message of the book is that what got you to where you are today will not get you to tomorrow. This is especially true for every person and every business right now. It's worth pointing out that in his January State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report, Rob forecasts a return to better numbers in the industry, but "what has been normal will not be normal again. The rising tide won't lift all boats after we bottom. You have to evolve now to be relevant and take advantage of what's coming."
Back to the June report, Rob writes:
"We are in a phase where the underlying market truths are finally being nearly universally accepted. As I often say, you can't fix what you can't or don't identify. Agreeing on what needs to be fixed aligns employees and empowers solutioning. This is an optimal time to reexamine tactics and strategies, take stock of company differentiation as assets and search for 'next.'
[That] means thinking in new ways to find new sources of revenue with upside; opportunities that can grow your top line without relying solely on the consumer walking through the front door or expecting distributors with their own issues to agree to take you on as their next client."
Here's where my old world has something to offer the new one.
In product work, "search for next" isn't a phase you enter when things get bad. It's a standing discipline with two parts: research and prototyping. Research means talking to customers before you build, not after you launch. Prototyping means making the smallest version of an idea that can teach you something, putting it in front of real people, and letting the results decide what happens next. Nobody bets the company. You bet an afternoon, then a week, then a quarter, and by the time you make the big commitment it isn't a bet anymore.
The wine industry seems to run (I'm still learning) on the opposite rhythm, and for good reason. A vintage is one shot per year. You can't prototype harvest. The whole culture is built around planning carefully and committing fully, because on the production side, that's the only way it works.
The problem is that mindset leaks into the commercial side, where it doesn't belong. A club tier, a tasting format, a price point, an email offer—these are cheap, fast, and reversible. They can be tested in weeks with fifty customers. The old playbook is well known: plan for months, launch at full scale, live with the results for a year.
Everything ships. Nothing pilots. Nothing learned.
So when McMillan says to search for next, I'd add one word: search small. Test the new membership idea with a handful of your best customers before building it for the whole list. Send the new offer to ten percent of the list before the full drop. None of this requires new software or a consultant. It requires permission to run something small that might fail, and developing the habit of measuring what happened, making adjustments, and repeating.
The industry already knows how to make thirty-year bets. The future will be decided by those who learn to make thirty-day ones.