National Wine Month 2012 to kick off with major event

Building on the success of May’s inaugural National Wine Month, next year’s will kick off with a major event, and be fronted by a mainstream personality.

Ian Harris, chief executive of the Wine & Spirit Education trust, who headed up the month-long initiative, said it has “firmly established itself” but that he hoped next year will be “bigger and better”.

Harris told Harpers the campaign attracted financial contributions from more than 50 companies, and that activities were carried out by 68 consumer brands.
The 2012 campaign will be launched at a stakeholder meeting later this month. Harris said: “The main thing for next year is that it needs an event to kick it off and an ambassador.”

He said the celebrity front man or woman would not be a wine personality. The initiative would also need to invest more in social networking and “start the ball rolling earlier” to allow major retailers to plan ahead.

This year’s activities centred a lot around reduced-price wines, but Harris hopes to see more in-store activity and on-trade participation in 2012. It also plans to redesign the website to allow participating companies to upload their own activities.

National Wine Month generated 394 pieces of media coverage in all in 2011, including 155 pieces in the national press.

More than 27,000 people entered competitions held throughout the month, with prizes supplied by 13 different companies. In addition, 229 people registered for the Make Time for Wine course online.

Harris said the major multiples joined in, alongside Constellation (now trading as Accolade Wines), Treasury Wine Estates and Pernod Ricard UK, and smaller firms including Patriarche, Bancroft, Free Run Wines and others.

Tesco ran a series of activities on Tesco.com, and TWE provided the supermarket with personal wine shoppers in-store, while a competition to win a year’s worth of wine from the grocer ran in the Daily Express.

Tesco product development manager Laura Jewell MW said: “The key for retailers is getting suppliers to work together on tastings in-store, which they normally find too expensive on their own. We aim to include this in our activities next year.”