What would $1 customer acquisition do for you?
Plus the one-word menu change that fixed a dead cocktail, and three numbers on the inventory glut.
Jeremy Young5 min read
Today's Alcohol Industry Insider Newsletter
What's inside:
🎯 Steal This Play: Treat the grocery aisle like a tasting room: $1 per customer acquired
🎯 Steal This Play: Rename the drink, not the recipe: the fix that moved a dead cocktail
📊 Three Numbers: Only 16% of the largest wineries say they have no excess inventory
🔁 Sales and Retention Ideas: Sell the occasion, not the varietal: four plays for AOV and reorder rate
💡 AI Prompts You Can Use: Turn one order export into a best-customer profile, ad targeting, and a referral offer
Treat the grocery aisle like a tasting room: $1 per customer acquired
Jessica Kogan built HSP Brands around a problem most suppliers live with: you ship product into national grocery chains and then have no idea what shoppers think of it until Nielsen tells you months later. On the XChateau podcast, Kogan (CEO of HSP Brands, previously co-founder of Cameron Hughes Wine, where she took the DTC business from $25M to $150M in 3 years at Vintage Wine Estates) laid out how she closes that gap.
The play: run in-store tastings as a measured channel. One supplier per event. Usually one bottle sampled, sometimes a portfolio. Staff are trained W2 part-timers who go through in-person interviews, shadowing, and a nine-part digital training module before their first shift. Every consumer interaction gets logged into a database that reports brand performance, consumer hesitations, and recommendations.
The results Kogan cites: over $100 million of product sold, more than 1 million consumer conversations last year, results visible within 48 hours of each event, and tasting data showing trends 8 to 12 weeks before Nielsen catches them. Pricing runs $225 for three hours or $375 per additional hour, three-hour minimum, with four hours recommended and 50 to 100 events across two markets as the typical program.
Adapt it down: pick your five best accounts, staff the tastings yourself, and have whoever pours log three things on a phone, bottles sold, number of conversations, and the single most common objection. A retailer can do this with their own staff on a Saturday. A brewery or distillery can do it at tasting events where sampling is allowed in your state.
Count the objections, not just the bottles. The objections tell you whether the problem is price, label, or the shelf position, and that is the part you can fix before the next event.
You are a trade marketing manager for a beverage alcohol brand. I want to run a measured in-store tasting program and I need a one-page event plan plus a data capture sheet.
My situation:
- Category and product: [e.g. $18 Oregon Pinot Gris, 6-pack craft IPA, small-batch gin]
- Markets and accounts: [e.g. 5 independent bottle shops in Portland, 2 Albertsons stores in Phoenix]
- Who will pour: [owner, sales rep, hired demo staff]
- Hours per event and budget per event: [e.g. 3 hours, $200]
- What I want to learn: [e.g. is $18 too high, does the label read as premium, who is actually buying]
Produce:
1. A 4-hour event run of show: setup, pour size, what the pourer says in the first 10 seconds, the one question they ask every shopper, and breakdown.
2. A data capture sheet with no more than 6 fields a pourer can fill in on a phone between shoppers. Include bottles sold, conversations, and most common objection.
3. The 5 objections most likely to come up for my product, and a one-sentence response to each that a part-time pourer can memorize.
4. A simple math model: at my cost per event, how many bottles I need to sell plus 24-hour follow-on purchases to hit a cost per customer under $5.
5. A 10-line after-action report template I can fill out within 48 hours and send to the retailer and my distributor rep.
Push back if my budget or account list makes the program unlikely to produce readable data, and tell me the smallest version I could run this month instead. Keep it specific to beverage alcohol retail. No generic event marketing advice.
Rename the drink, not the recipe: the fix that moved a dead cocktail
At the Lobby Bar inside Hotel Chelsea, a signature cocktail called Mercury Pool barely sold. The drink was good. Guests just would not order it.
Brian Evans, director of bars for Sunday Hospitality Group, told the Business of Drinks podcast that they renamed it the 1884 Martini, after the year the hotel was built. Same spec, same glass, same price. Sales went night-and-day immediately, and it became the Lobby Bar's most popular cocktail. That bar served roughly 280,000 drinks in 2025, so the name was the only variable that moved.
Evans's rule behind it: "Undersell, overdeliver. You have a cocktail name. Don't give a word salad on the ingredients." He also notes that when money gets tight, guests retreat to familiar drinks and classics. A name that signals a category people already know (martini, spritz, old fashioned) lowers the risk of ordering it.
Adapt it by size. A tasting room renames the flight that never upsells: "Reserve Experience" beats "Vertical Exploration." A taproom gives the slow-moving sour a style word people recognize. A distillery renames a house cocktail after the build year or the street address. A shop retitles a shelf talker around the occasion instead of the grape. A distributor rep brings the account three menu names for a stalled by-the-glass placement.
Pick your single worst seller that you believe in. Change only the name for 30 days and compare units sold against the prior 30.
You are a beverage menu strategist who has written cocktail, wine, and beer lists for high-volume restaurants and tasting rooms. My business is a [winery / brewery / distillery / retail shop / bar] in [city or region]. My slow seller is [item name], which is [describe the liquid, style, ABV, and price]. It currently sells about [units per week] compared with [best seller name] at [units per week]. My brand's history includes [founding year, family names, address, original building use, vineyard or neighborhood name, anything local]. My guests are mostly [describe them: hotel guests, locals, bachelorette groups, trade buyers, club members].
Give me:
1. Twelve alternative names for this item, each one anchored to a familiar category word my guest already knows (martini, spritz, old fashioned, pilsner, rosé, highball) or to a specific piece of my brand history. No invented foreign words, no abstract art-gallery names.
2. For each name, one line on who orders it and why they would pick it over my current best seller.
3. A menu description for your top three names, maximum 12 words each, listing no more than the spirit or grape and one hook. Undersell it.
4. A flag on any name that overpromises on what the liquid actually delivers.
5. A simple 30-day test plan: what to change, what to hold constant, and the one number I should compare at the end.
Push back if my history details are too generic to build a name from, and tell me what to go find. If your first list feels clever rather than orderable, give me a second list of six names that a tired guest at 9pm would say out loud without hesitating.
Only 16% of the largest wineries say they have no excess inventory
16% of the largest wineries report no excess inventory, according to the 2026 BMO Wine Market Report cited by WineBusiness, which also found 25% of wine companies considering selling a production facility, 13% weighing vineyard sales, and 18% possibly leaving acreage fallow. If you buy bulk, glass, fruit, or finished goods, you are the one with leverage in Q4 negotiations, so ask for terms, not just price.
9.8% drop in Burgundy's U.S. shipment volume to 19.1 million bottles in the 12 months through July, with value down 21.2% to €292 million, per the Bourgogne Wine Board as reported by Daniel Marsteller in Shanken News Daily. Retailers and on-premise buyers should push importers for allocation on names that were impossible to get two years ago.
2% volume decline for spirits priced $25 and up in control states through the first eight months of this year, better than the 2.6% decline for the full-strength category, per Impact Databank in Shanken News Daily. The top shelf is holding better than the middle, so protect your premium price and fix your mid-tier story instead.
Sell the occasion, not the varietal: four plays for AOV and reorder rate
On the Beverage Dynamics podcast, HSP Brands CEO Jessica Kogan walks through what moves a buyer at the point of purchase: occasion-based buying, sampling, and packaging innovation. Four ways to put that to work.
Relabel your menu and shelf tags by occasion this week. Replace "2024 Albariño" with "2024 Albariño: oysters, fish tacos, hot afternoons." Zero budget, and it moves tasting room and shelf conversion rate because the guest no longer has to guess when to open it.
Pour a splash of the next release at every club pickup. Kogan's point about sampling applies inside your own four walls: a 1 oz taste of the wine or spirit they have not bought yet is the cheapest add-on pitch you have. Track add-on rate and AOV per pickup.
Build two occasion packs your club can reorder between shipments. A weeknight pack and a host-gift pack, each with a pairing card. This takes setup in your cart, and it moves reorder rate, which is the number that quietly protects club churn.
Have your sales rep sell a retail account on a recurring occasion tasting, not a brand tasting. Tailgate night, holiday gifting, patio season. Repeat dates beat one-offs for sell-through.
Start with the menu rewrite Monday, then measure conversion against last month before you spend a dollar on the rest.
You are a DTC merchandiser for a [winery / brewery / distillery / retail wine and spirits shop] in [region]. I am rewriting how we present our products so each one is sold by the occasion instead of by varietal, style, or category.
Here is my lineup with prices and a one-line description of each: [PASTE 6 TO 12 SKUs].
My typical guest is [e.g., couples in their 30s and 40s visiting on weekends / weekday after-work shoppers near an office district / club members reordering online].
My average order value today is [$X] and my goal is [$Y].
Produce:
1. For each SKU, one occasion line of 8 words or fewer that names a specific moment, food, or setting a real person would recognize (for example "oysters, fish tacos, hot afternoons"). No tasting notes, no adjectives like elegant or complex.
2. Three two-bottle or two-can bundles built around occasions my guest actually has, each with a name, the SKUs included, a price that lifts AOV toward my goal, and one sentence of sell copy.
3. Two questions my staff should ask a guest before recommending anything, designed to surface the occasion rather than the guest's taste preferences.
4. A short list of which SKUs have no obvious occasion, and tell me straight whether the problem is the product, the price, or the way I described it.
If any suggestion needs new packaging, a new label, or a production change, flag it and give me a version I can run this month with inventory I already have.
Turn one order export into a best-customer profile, ad targeting, and a referral offer
The outcome: a written report that names your highest-value customer segments, where they live, what they buy first and second, how they found you, and a ready-to-run ad targeting plan plus one referral offer aimed at the people most likely to accept it. Work you would otherwise pay an agency for, or never get around to at all.
Tool: Claude Cowork (now part of Claude). Difficulty: Advanced, because it reads a file from your own computer. Cowork needs a paid Claude plan. Claude Pro runs about $20 a month, or about $17 a month billed yearly, and Max starts around $100 a month. Check Anthropic's pricing page before you buy.
Setup, step by step:
Make a new folder on your computer called Customer Analysis.
Export your full order history from your commerce or POS system as CSV or Excel and drop it in that folder. Include customer name or ID, zip code, order date, order total, products, and the signup or acquisition source if you track it.
If you have a separate club roster or email list export with signup source, add it to the same folder.
Open the Claude desktop app, point Cowork at that folder, and paste the prompt.
Give it 10 to 30 minutes depending on file size.
A brewery runs this on taproom loyalty data to find the zip codes worth a geofenced ad. A distillery finds which first bottle predicts a second purchase. A retail shop finds which neighborhoods carry the basket size worth a loyalty push. A distributor rep can run it on account-level sales to see which account profile reorders fastest.
You are a direct-to-consumer analyst for beverage alcohol brands. You specialize in turning raw order exports into customer profiles, paid-ad targeting, and referral offers that actually get accepted.
Read every file in this folder. They are order and customer exports from my business.
My situation:
- Business: [BUSINESS TYPE AND NAME, e.g. a 6,000-case winery in Paso Robles, a production brewery with one taproom, a craft gin distillery]
- What I sell and price range: [e.g. estate reds at $38 to $85, a club at $140 a shipment, 4-packs at $14]
- Market: [e.g. we ship to 38 states, 70% of tasting room traffic is local, we self-distribute in two counties]
- Monthly ad budget: [e.g. $1,500]
- Referral reward I can afford: [e.g. a free bottle, $25 credit, a free tasting for four, a brewery tour]
- Column names in my file: [e.g. customer_id, zip, order_date, order_total, sku, source]
Before analyzing, list the columns you found and tell me which ones are missing or unusable. Do not guess at missing data.
Then produce a Word document with these sections:
1. The Top 20%. Rank customers by lifetime spend. Describe the top 20% with real numbers: average lifetime value, average order value, number of orders, months between orders, and how much of total revenue they represent.
2. Where They Are. List the top 15 zip codes and top 5 metro areas by revenue from this group, with customer counts. Flag any zip code that over-indexes against my total customer base.
3. What They Buy. Name the specific product that most often appears in a first order among high-value customers, and the product that most often appears in the second order. Tell me the first-to-second purchase path by SKU. If a product shows up often in first orders but rarely leads to a second order, say so plainly.
4. How They Found Us. Break the top 20% down by acquisition source if the data exists (tasting room, website, event, club signup, wholesale pull-through, referral). Rank sources by lifetime value per customer, not by count. If source data is missing, say so and skip this section.
5. Three Segments. Define three distinct named segments inside my best customers, with the count in each, what makes them different, and which one I should spend money on first. Example output style: "Local Repeat Taproom (412 people, 3 zips, buys 4-packs monthly, never ships)" versus "Out-of-State Gift Buyer (190 people, peaks in November, highest AOV, lowest repeat rate)."
6. Ad Targeting Plan. For my budget, give me: which segment to target, the exact zip code or radius list to paste into Meta and Google, which customer list to upload for a lookalike audience, the product and price point to lead the creative with, and three ad angles written for that segment. Beverage-specific only. No generic ecommerce advice.
7. The Referral Offer. Build one referral offer aimed at the single segment most likely to refer, based on their order frequency and recency in the data. Give me the reward for the referrer, the reward for the friend, the exact email or SMS copy (under 90 words), who to send it to by name of segment and count, and the one metric to watch after 30 days.
8. What I Should Stop. Name one thing the data suggests I am wasting money or attention on.
Rules: every claim must trace to a number in my files, and show that number. If the data cannot support a section, write "Insufficient data" and tell me which column would fix it. Do not invent benchmarks or industry averages. Be direct. If my best customers are a smaller or less flattering group than I think, say it.
Variables to swap: [BUSINESS TYPE AND NAME], [WHAT YOU SELL AND PRICE RANGE], [YOUR MARKET OR SHIPPING STATES], [MONTHLY AD BUDGET], [REFERRAL REWARD YOU CAN AFFORD], [THE COLUMN NAMES IN YOUR FILE].
What to do with it: take the zip code and segment list straight into Meta or Google as a customer list upload and a lookalike audience. Take the referral offer and send it this week to the single segment the report ranks first, not your whole list. Save the report in the same folder and rerun the prompt every quarter to see if the profile moved.
If the output reads like generic marketing advice, reply with: "Use only what is in my file. Cite the actual zip codes, products, and counts behind every claim."
What good output looks like: named segments with real counts and real zip codes from your data, a second-purchase product you can actually see in the file, and a referral offer written for one specific group instead of everyone.
From the Editor:
I am always open to consulting, implementation, or brainstorming sessions. Just respond to this email, and I will get back to you shortly.
Alcohol Industry Insider Newsletter: the three-times-a-week growth newsletter for wine, beer, and spirits businesses that need smarter marketing, better sales, practical AI tools, and clear ideas they can implement now.
By Jeremy Young: serial entrepreneur, growth marketer, wine critic, and beverage industry insider.
Respond to this email with questions, ideas, or opportunities, and I will get back to you shortly!
Until next time,
Jeremy
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