In wineries, everyone feels entitled to an opinion on marketing, while production is respected as a matter of expertise. This double standard forces communication professionals to justify decisions based on personal taste rather than strategy, results, and objectives. Real marketing requires strategic thinking under tight budgets, not just creativity, and deserves the same respect given to winemaking expertise.
Following the publication of my article on hospitality, “The hospitality paradox: appreciated outside, undervalued inside,” I received many messages. Almost all told the same story from different angles: relationship work, hospitality, and positioning are still treated as an accessory compared to those who “actually produce.”
One of these, however, first made me smile and then made me think. It was written by someone who handles marketing and communication within a company, and who brought up the Aristocats: just as everyone wants to make jazz, so everyone in the winery feels like a marketing expert.
This is exactly how it is: there is the sales director who has a precise idea about the campaign, the owner who rejects the label color because he doesn’t like it, the cousin who on Instagram “would do it differently.” None of them, however, would ever walk into the cellar to explain to the winemaker how to manage a fermentation. Yet on the logo, the post, the tone of a newsletter, everyone has an opinion.
The problem starts here, in this asymmetry. Production is judged on competence, communication on taste. And when something is judged on taste, then anyone’s opinion counts.
There is also a fundamental misunderstanding: that it is a fun job. People think of the photos, the social media, the events, the nice part, but they see much less of the rest: looking at the numbers, mediating with the sales team, holding together different needs, making everything work with often razor thin budgets. Marketing in a winery is not creativity having fun, but strategy working under tight constraints.
And above all, a communication choice is not made because I like it, or because the agency likes it, it is made because it works. Because it responds to an objective, an audience, a positioning.
This is the difference between a preference and a professional decision, a difference that many companies still struggle to recognize.
The result is the same paradox as hospitality: wineries invest in marketing, hire well prepared professionals, and then ask them to base their work on colleagues’ preferences instead of putting their skills to use.
Those who do this job well do not ask to always be right, rather they ask to be listened to for what they know, just as the winemaker is listened to on wine or the export manager on markets. They ask that “I don’t like it” stop being a valid argument for revising the entire marketing strategy.
As long as communication is judged on taste and not on results, wineries will keep paying professionals only to treat them as mere executors.
And the most prepared, sooner or later, will go make jazz somewhere else.
Key points
- Communication is judged on taste, while production is judged on competence and expertise.
- Everyone in the winery feels entitled to an opinion on marketing, unlike winemaking decisions.
- Marketing is strategic work under tight budgets, not just creative fun with photos and social media.
- Professional decisions require objectives, not personal preferences from owners, managers, or family members.
- Skilled marketers eventually leave wineries that treat their expertise as replaceable personal opinion.
