Online wine sales took flight during the pandemic

How long is it going to last?

As soon as lockdown was announced, the rates of online wine sales skyrocketed, seeing an increase of 27.6% if confronted with the same time of the last year.

Panic buying or a new idea of the wine market?

The Digital revolution was a promising path for wine way before the pandemic hit the entire globe, but is without any doubt this last event that has changed the industry forever. The undeniable influence of social media, in fact, pushed many businesses to introduce themselves to the digital communities, developing new ways to enter in touch with their audience.

Virtual tastings, digitalised winery tours and more creative ways of online promotion have for sure shown a common sense of bravery among the entrepreneurs and this is leading towards the first big change in the industry culture, overtaking the place of the old beloved brochures and traditional media channels promotion. One the one hand, the specific social context played an indisputable role in increasing the interest for new ways of promoting themselves, highlighting a considerable gap among the same businesses on the other.

This rapid change of rules in the game for sure knocked out the ones not ready to be flexible enough to see in the digital world an opportunity, giving the chance to the brave ones to explore a new virgin area, that could have given the right perspectives.

During this evolution process, the audience did its part. The reach of emerging wine related blogs has shown that the public loves to know more about what they gladly order comfortably sitting in their living-room, participating in events that they unlikely would usually have.

For what concerns the wine industry the digital market still has a huge possibility to make this trend become its new normal and to do so the bravery and courage to learn from this global experience will be the true test bench for a business. Today, the big deal of this situation is the possibility to capitalise more experiences than ever, analysing and taking into account all the possible evolution processes to a market that needs to shift as soon as the public demands.