The end user who asks questions puts more than a few of us on the production/distribution/retail side of the equation in the uncomfortable position of having to engage in conversation and eventually having to say the dreaded words "I", "don't" and "know". However, the more we're willing to listen to questions and engage in conversation, the better we are at doing our jobs.
As any person experienced in sales will tell you, the person asking the questions is in a dominant position. How much of the wine world's gatekeeping and pressure to align with any one of its several self-selecting tribes (natural wine, "bro" wine, old-school European, etc) is a knee-jerk pushback, spawned by our natural discomfort at not being in the dominant position when clients have questions?
And to what degree do the camps we line up in and the gatekeepers we align with actually preclude our clients' questioning? How many of us secretly- or not so secretly- don't want to deal with questions? Maybe it's good marketing to simply signal to fellow travelers that our businesses operate under the Apple/Patagonia rubric that "people like us do things like this", but in a world where the major trend in wine consumption is reducing consumption, shifting consumption to other beverages- or quitting altogether- it's hard to see how growth happens in an environment where consumers have to choose which tribe they're in before they can regularly enjoy a glass of wine.
The end user who asks questions puts more than a few of us on the production/distribution/retail side of the equation in the uncomfortable position of having to engage in conversation and eventually having to say the dreaded words "I", "don't" and "know". However, the more we're willing to listen to questions and engage in conversation, the better we are at doing our jobs.
As any person experienced in sales will tell you, the person asking the questions is in a dominant position. How much of the wine world's gatekeeping and pressure to align with any one of its several self-selecting tribes (natural wine, "bro" wine, old-school European, etc) is a knee-jerk pushback, spawned by our natural discomfort at not being in the dominant position when clients have questions?
And to what degree do the camps we line up in and the gatekeepers we align with actually preclude our clients' questioning? How many of us secretly- or not so secretly- don't want to deal with questions? Maybe it's good marketing to simply signal to fellow travelers that our businesses operate under the Apple/Patagonia rubric that "people like us do things like this", but in a world where the major trend in wine consumption is reducing consumption, shifting consumption to other beverages- or quitting altogether- it's hard to see how growth happens in an environment where consumers have to choose which tribe they're in before they can regularly enjoy a glass of wine.