Welcome to our first newsletter!
We’re the partnerships team at Wine Folly, and once a month we’ll send field notes for the business of wine: a trend worth a look, a number worth knowing, and the occasional way we can help.
Glad to have you here.
Where the next wave shows up
It’s the question for the second half of 2026.
The next wave of wine buyers drinks differently and across more categories, and per SVB’s 2026 State of the Industry, the growth is in the group now moving into wine.
Meanwhile a lot of the media built to reach them is quietly losing steam. SVB’s own read on the tasting room sums it up: relying on people to come to you no longer works, so you have to go to where the consumers are.
The brands pulling ahead are putting budget toward destination audiences. People who show up on purpose, on whatever platform fits the moment, because they came to learn. That is the part of the market a borrowed page view can’t buy you.
For the rest of the year, that is the difference between budget that gets seen and budget that gets remembered.
Wine drinkers are keen to learn the basics, which is why how to taste wine is one of our most-read guides. That appetite to learn is exactly the audience a brand integration reaches here.
60%
Of people learning wine with Wine Folly are 25 to 44.
The exact group most brands are chasing, arriving on purpose, coming back as their tastes (and their budgets) grow.
What this looks like in practice
Catena came to us with that exact ask. Reach a younger audience at the fine wine tier, introduce Massale Selection in plain terms, and do it without sounding like an ad.
We ran a program across four channels this spring, timed to World Malbec Day: a short video, a takeover of our most-read Malbec article, a sponsored email blast, and banners across the site.
The article takeover held an average session of nearly 20 minutes, the best of any brand takeover we ran this year, and the program closed out north of 770K in combined reach and impressions. That is what a destination audience looks like in the numbers: people who already came to learn lean in when a brand has something to teach them.
About a million of them follow Wine Folly to do exactly that.
From friends in the trade
How the Safest Business in Alcohol Blew Up in Drinks Insider. Jeff Siegel on the RNDC implosion and what it says about how concentrated and fragile the alcohol middle tier has become. Worth the time for anyone planning around distribution right now.
Why More Wineries Are Betting on High-Volume Wines in SevenFifty Daily. Amy Beth Wright on accessible, larger production runs as a real growth strategy, from boxed Bordeaux blends in Texas to big rosé programs in Long Island. A useful read on where the category is going.
Wine Sales Multiplier: Top Tips from WISE x Enolytics. (June 17th) A live webinar with the Enolytics team alongside WISE, on what’s moving DTC sales in a tough market.
Get in touch
Wine Folly is booking partnership programs for the second half of 2026: social and video collaborations, custom courses and course integrations, region guides like our new Pennsylvania guide, and sponsored newsletter sends.
If you train a team, we opened trade pricing on the courses our audience already learns from. A short conversation is the fastest way to see whether there’s a fit, so if reaching the people who show up on purpose is on your list, just reply and tell us what you’re working on.
Until next month,
The partnerships team at Wine Folly
P.S. Hope you enjoyed our first newsletter. Let us know what you think by replying to this email. Would love to hear from you.
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