Wines & Vines’ Good News Index

Dtcsales I have great hope that 2011 will see a significant shift in our economy. I'm hoping we see a trend toward hiring and a significant reduction in unemployment. A forward moving economy is good for the wine industry. That means its good for my business and good for my friends and colleagues in the wine industry.

But while we have significant indicators of the past, current and future state of the American economy, one has too look a little harder for wine industry trend reporting that acts as indicators, forward and trailing. The current leader in delivering wine industry economic trend information is Wines & Vines Magazines.

Currently, in every issue, they are publishing THE WINE INDUSTRY DATA CENTER. W&V in collaboration with folks like Symphony IRA, WineJobs.com, and ShipCompliant are delivering three very interesting sets of tracking data:

1.Month By Month, Off Premise Domestic Wine Sales

2.Month By Month Direct To Consumer Sales

3. Month by Month Job Listings at WineJobs.com

Currently, these three measurements published by Wines and Vines might be called the Good News Index.

For the last month published on line (October), we see that Domestic wine sales were up 6% over October 2009, that the value of direct to consumer sales are up 31% over October 2009, and job listings on WineJobs.com are up 28% over October 2009.

The next issue of Wines & Vines, February (coming out in late January to coincide with the Unified Winesandvines Symposium will have updated numbers through December 2010 that show how these metrics compared with December 2009. I'm hoping for continued significant gains.

What's cool about these three indices is that one gives a picture of the health of large wine brands, one gives a picture of the health of smaller wine producers, and the jobs index gives a sense of the needs and optimism level of the wine trade going forward. These are very important indicators for planning purposes.

I'm heartened to see that that listings of wine related jobs up 28% in October 2010 over October 2009 and will be watching closely to see how these numbers fair in December 2010 and, particularly, January 2010.

 

 

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4 Responses

  1. Mark - January 10, 2011

    Tom-Those numbers look about right to me. January should bring a fairly dramatic downturn as the industry turns down after the holiday rush, but things seem much improved year over year. The wider economy in the USA seems a ton better than this time last year.

  2. Tom Wark - January 10, 2011

    Mark,
    What I want to see are year over year numbers for December and then I want to see that common January drop from December and November that is still a year over year increase from 2009.
    Tom….

  3. Mark - January 11, 2011

    I agree there Tom (perhaps I wasn’t that clear, my apologies). For what it’s worth (we’re really small still, only a year in) both our conversion rate and average scale came up significantly.

  4. Christian Miller - January 11, 2011

    Kudos to Hugh Tietjen and Jason Eckenroth for producing some substantive hard data on direct wine shipments, a difficult channel to measure.


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