Wine: Finding success in times of crisis

As the wine world is facing an unprecedented crisis associated with diminishing demand and given the characteristics of the Chilean wine industry, novel solutions are needed to improve the current economic situation of grape growers and wine producers.

This report summarizes lessons learned after visiting several wine regions across Europe looking into their success story. The goal was to understand the key characteristics of each area, how growers built their region’s reputation, the way they organized themselves to protect the quality of their wines, their marketing and production techniques, alongside ideas related to associativity, attitudes toward wine tourism and personal traits in growers, such as  resilience and adaptability to market fluctuations.

The main question pivoted around how wine producers and their regions attained their current reputation in the market, and how they worked to preserve and promote it despite difficult times they faced in the past, also discussing their challenges and obstacles, past, present and future.

The main focus of the visits was wine producers, but in order to gain a better understanding and capture diverse ideas, universities and research centers, museums, restaurants, touristic attractions and regional trade associations related to wine were also visited.

Lessons gathered were divided in two main groups: regional traits that can be found in wine regions as an overall characteristic such as associativity, importance of critical mass, relationship with the press, the synergy with tourism and gastronomy, building an ecosystem beyond wine and the importance of sensible regulations. The second group were individual traits that producers exhibited, among them resilience, adaptability to market fluctuations, importance of diversifying, an inquisitive mindset and sustainability.

All these lessons can be studied and applied to a wide range of scenarios, from established wine regions to up-and-coming ones, and across a diverse range of sizes such as smaller winery start-ups and larger traditional wineries. In addition, many of them can be applied by governing bodies, growers’ associations and entities related to tourism. As the wine world is in need of urgent reforms, these ideas offer useful tools to include in the process of finding creative solutions to this crisis.