If you've followed any recent news about the wine industry, you know it's going through a rough stretch. Wineries are closing, vineyards are coming out, and visitor traffic is down. On top of that, the weather keeps getting harder to predict. The wine industry will come out the other side of this period, but it will look different. The wineries that make it through will be the ones that built resiliency into their business.
Resiliency isn't something that just happens. It's a set of strategic decisions about how you plant, how you sell, how you staff, and how you pay for what you need. That choice is strategic, and it comes with a cost: thought, planning, and often working a different way. When the market slows, these are the decisions that allow resilient wineries to thrive.
The Two Stages to Build Resiliency
Resiliency gets built in two stages.
The planning stage. This is where you can make every decision with minimal additional cost. That covers everything from where you'll source your grapes to who you hire, how you pay them, and what you outsource.
The stewardship stage. For wineries already operating. Building resiliency in an existing winery forces a fresh look at what you've been doing, so you can see what's still working and change what isn't.
At either stage it takes thoughtful, strategic planning. It takes time. But it's time worth spending. When a down market or severe weather hits, that planning is what leaves you prepared to pivot.
Start With Your Tenets
Know where you can't compromise. Your winery's vision and the values behind it are the tenets everything else runs on. If your vision isn't written down, or you haven't looked at it in a while, that's the first fix, not something to skip. Ask yourself whether each tenet is truly necessary, and whether it's actually yours. Wineries often borrow their core tenets, carried over from the wines that first drew the owner into the industry. Resiliency requires options, and options require knowing which constraints are genuinely yours and which aren't.
Planning: Building Resiliency In From the Start
If you're at the planning stage, this is the best time to build resiliency in. Go through every piece of your winery and ask yourself where you can build in options and where you have a hard constraint. Grapes are a good place to start.
Plant for climate change, not the average year you're used to. Site and variety diversification are expensive once a vineyard is already planted. That's why for an existing winery they're usually a last resort, worth doing only when a vineyard is already due for replanting. For a startup, it's the opposite. You're already choosing sites and varieties from scratch, so climate resiliency costs planning time, not extra capital. Choose varieties that can perform even if the site runs hotter in the growing season or colder in the dormant season than normal. A variety that's marginal for your climate is a risk. It can be a good one, but know your own risk tolerance before you plant it.
Build a lean, trained, well-paid team. Fewer, well-trained employees paid a wage that reflects their value will serve you better than a larger staff, spread thin and underpaid. Good people are hard to find and expensive to keep, especially in areas with few wineries nearby. Invest in that team from day one. Train them not just for their own job, but to cover other roles when their part of the operation slows down.
Stewardship: Building Resiliency Into What You Already Have
Build sourcing relationships before you need them. Know your local growers, and know which vineyards can meet your quality bar if your own fruit runs into trouble. Distance matters too: a vineyard farther from your own is less likely to face the same event. Buying bulk wine is a legitimate option as well, if you go in knowing exactly what you’re replacing on flavor profile, quality, price, and volume.
Train your tasting room and build your direct channels. Distribution isn’t the resiliency answer right now. It relies on high volume and low margins. It can work for a small winery that wants to diversify longterm, but building profitably takes years. A winery can’t pivot into it overnight. The real lever is trained tasting room staff and a wine club process that starts the moment a reservation is made. Invest in your staff, your technology and build a strong wine club and e-commerce presence.
Look at what you can outsource. Compliance is genuinely hard and expensive to manage in-house. There are companies built specifically to handle shipping compliance for small wineries. Being able to ship nationally without building that infrastructure yourself is real, buyable resiliency. Compare a fulfillment shipper’s rates against your own. Often the savings cover the added cost of using one. Beyond handing off work you’re not equipped to do well, outsourcing frees up capacity for your own staff.
What should you finance? Cash reserves are the standard advice, but that’s not practical for wineries struggling right now. Financing a press, a bottling line, or a barrel order keeps cash in the winery instead of tying it up in capital purchases. That cash is what gives you options if a disruptive event or a slow season hits.
The options above are just a starting list for building resiliency into your winery. To truly have resilience you must have more than just options. You must have the extra capacity to take on something new and pivot quickly when the need arrises. To do that you have to build in slack, deliberately, for yourself and your staff. An overtaxed staff can’t pivot when things go wrong.The options above are just a starting list for building resiliency into your winery. To truly have resilience you must have more than just options. You must have the extra capacity to take on something new and pivot quickly when the need arrises. To do that you have to build in slack, deliberately, for yourself and your staff. An overtaxed staff can't pivot when things go wrong.
Resiliency isn't free. It takes strategic planning, time, and often capital. Building it in early is what lets you thrive when the market gets tough. The wineries that make it through this period will be the ones that thrive in the next one. If you need help building resiliency into your winery please let me know.