The tasting room used to be the heart of the winery business model. Walk-ins became club members. Club members became brand ambassadors. Revenue flowed predictably, and the formula worked. That’s changing. Visitation to wine regions is softening and tasting room traffic that wineries once counted...

Your next customer will see your winery before they ever taste your wine. They'll see it on Instagram while planning a weekend trip. They'll see it on your website while deciding whether to book a reservation. They'll see it in an email while considering whether your wine club is worth joining. And...

The weather is shifting, trip-planning season is underway, and tasting room traffic is about to pick up. This is the good news. The bad news? If you're reading this and thinking "we'll get to our spring marketing when spring gets here," you're behind. The tasting rooms that stay full from April...

Why Wineries Need Influencer Marketing Now Here's a number that should reshape how you think about marketing: 69% of consumers trust influencer recommendations more than information coming directly from a brand That's not a slight edge. That's a fundamental shift in how people decide what to buy....

As wineries navigate shifting consumer behavior, rising costs, and increasing compliance complexity, one thing is clear. The gap between average and top performing direct to consumer programs is widening. At eCELLAR, we see this play out every day across our winery clients. The difference is not...

How Wineries Can Use Simple SEO To Get More Tasting Room Traffic You need more people in your tasting room. You don’t have more money to spend on ads, and they’re not working as well as they used to anyway. You would like to get more traffic from searches on Google, but you’ve been told that SEO is...

eCELLAR's The Pulse: Making the Most of the Tasting Room Visit with Liz Mercer Date: April 22, 2026 Time: 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PT Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_D2JERMtnSdWzc0gkAaas4Q In the first session of this two part series, Beyond the Tasting Room, we explored how...

When I bring it up at cocktail parties, web optimization is a topic that makes people's eyes glaze over. Other times well-meaning people at said party try to save me by blurting out that they know all about search engine optimization(SEO). And while website optimization does include SEO, it is so...

We call it a Tasting Room, when it’s really a Sales Room. Why is that? After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, wineries re-opened in an environment where the government was highly suspicious of any and all alcohol sales. On-premise consumption was restricted and considered the purview of saloons,...

A few years ago at the DTC Wine Symposium, a panelist joked about the modern winery website formula: the guy, the dog, the truck, and the vineyard. Beautiful backdrop, strong lifestyle photography, a thoughtful founder story. Polished, absolutely. Strategically distinct, rarely. The critique wasn’t...