How Is Wine Industry Insight Different?

FROM WII EDITOR & PUBLISHER, LEWIS PERDUE

I’ve gotten a lot of solid, hard, pointed questions about Wine Industry Insight and what makes us different — how we complement other publications rather than compete with them.

I’ll do the best I can, and if I still don’t answer your question, then please email me (lewis [DOT] perdue [AT]wineindustryinsight [DOT] com) and I’ll try to do a better job.

A QUICK LOOK AT KEY DIFFERENCES

• Original investigative reporting unavailable anywhere else.
• At least 100 email issues per year, any one of which could pay for the subscription many times over.
• News delivered on Internet time: relevant, insightful and when it happens. No waiting for an issue date.
• We will remain all digital. Paper is slow, expensive and environmentally so last century. Plus, news delivered that way is history by the time you get it.
• The Data Cellar, our ever-expanding searchable database of studies, reports, presentations, spreadsheets, legal documents and more!

WHAT DOES “INSIGHT” MEAN”

One of the biggest differentiators is the digging and original reporting I do.  Recently, other news outlets told you that:

• Fosters was going to keep its wine business. WII’s digging gave you the resulting winery and vineyard reorganizations in California.
• A major new custom-crush facility was being built in Sonoma County. Only WII described when, where, how big, what the challenges would be and who financed the operation.
• Consumers were changing their wine-buying habits. WII told you what they were buying and shunning, and which wineries were prevailing during the changes.
• That wine sales were dismal. Only WII reported the astonishing jumps in January purchases.

Also in recent issues, Wine Industry Insight has broken many stories that no one else has covered. Those include:

• Mobius Painter/Winery Disposition Group saga
• Stevenot Chapter 11
• Conti/Charles B. Mitchell bankruptcy
• Copia reorganization and the legal challenge

INSIGHT EQUALS  DECISION TOOL

I look at serving up a “decision tool” — news and data my readers can ACT on that MAKES A DIFFERENCE to their business. Information that helps readers create a better picture of reality on which to make profitable decisions.

• How to survive and prevail in the drought?
• What are consumers buying? Where? What price points?
• Money saved is like income you don’t have to pay taxes on. Who is serving up meaningful ways to save on shipping, energy, water etc.
• What do you do when you find yourself a creditor to a bankrupt business?What can you legally do?
• How to finance winery expansion, vineyard capitalization. Who has the money? What does it take to get it?
• What’s the consumption trend now? When does it change?
• What varietals to plant?
• Which wineries or growers may be financially shaky?

THE DATA CELLAR

If you’ve been reading Wine Industry Insight, you know that I dig. I dig deep, hard, wide and far.

What I get is a lot of data: court filings, PowerPoint Presentations, Excel spreadsheets, Adobe Acrobat documents and more. These are the raw material I use for my articles.

I don’t use all of the data all of the time. A lot of it, I haven’t used at all. Some of it just sits there.

My eyes got opened in early February when I did a custom reorganization and sort on some of the 2008 Crush Report data. I made the Excel spreadsheet available to readers.

And … What the Hell!? Readers took the .xls file, re-sorted it, drew some more conclusions and sent it back! Great stuff!

That planted the seeds of the Data Cellar. I had been cataloging all these files so I could easily access them for my own use. But now I realize that you can use the data as well … whether you let me know about it or not.

So, what I am in the process of doing is taking all of those files, entering them into a database and indexing them so they can be searchable. This will take some time because I have a lot, a lot, a lot of data. And, eventually, so will you.

I’m out there digging so you don’t have to.