Betz Family Winery
Steve and Bridget Griessel, managing owners of Betz Family Winery in Redmond Washington, Cathy Betz and Bob Betz, Founder and Consulting winemaker.
Steve Griessel, owner of the Betz Family Winery in Washington State, is a serial entrepreneur who has founded or run multiple businesses over his career, including two public companies.
So he would obviously understand that business is a ruthless, cut throat affair, pitting companies against each other in an all out war for survival … right?
Wrong.
Griessel, an unassuming South African transplant to Washington, believes businesses survive best when they can work together to their mutual benefit. In a presentation to the BC Wine Institute’s Insight Forum, Griessel outlined how cooperation and a ‘neighbourly attitude’ helped Washington State become the second largest wine region in America.
“The first thing you’ve got to realize is that you’re not actually competing against each other; you’re competing against the rest of the world,” Griessel says.
The point of Griessel’s presentation to more than 100 growers and winemakers was that wineries in smaller wine regions will see better growth by working collaboratively to promote that region, as opposed to competing fiercely with their neighbours.
In that sense, BC winemakers provide a pretty receptive audience to that message. The BC wine industry has done a good job of organizing collective marketing campaigns, and winery owners have been known to help out other wineries when they’ve struggled through a crisis, such as the disastrous Summer of Fire in 2003.
But Griessel says there’s always room for improvement, and shared his region’s experience in building out an industry with 930 wineries and 55,000 acres of planted vines.
“It’s a very interesting region,” Griessel says. “We are now the second largest grape growing region in the United States after California … but of course, we are dwarfed by their wine region as they produce more wine than the rest of North America combined.”
Despite the huge disparity in size, Griessel says Washington wineries have prospered and grown by working on joint marketing campaigns that promote the quality of the region’s wines. That awareness has driven an almost unparalleled reputation among wine critics, which has in turn promoted the brand of Washington State wineries as a whole.
Griessel says making great wine is part of the job, but equally important is letting people know you’re making great wine. That’s something the Washington wineries have excelled at.
Between 2009 and 2016, 46 per cent of the wines produced in Washington earned a score of 90 or higher from Wine Spectator. That contrasts favourably with wines from California at 32 per cent, France at 42 per cent, Italy at 34 per cent, and Oregon at 45 per cent.
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Red Willow
The Red Willow Vineyard in the Yakima Valley is the farthest west and highest altitude vineyard.
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Betz Vineyards
Griessel currently serves as vice-chair at the Washington Wine Commission, and says highly targeted marketing by the entire sector helped establish the high reputation the state’s wineries enjoy.
“Being friends and neighbours and having great camaradarie is very critical to the success in our industry,” Griessel says. “In terms of marketing, we work together to ‘influence the influencers’, which includes the media, educational entities, core consumers, and what we call Pacific Northwest icons.”
A good example of the Wine Commission’s marketing strategy, Griessel says, are the frequent campaigns the wineries will run in select cities. The wineries work together in an organized marketing blitz, creating buzz around their products and educating bloggers, sommeliers and influential consumers (who typically have a large social media following) over a short but intense period.
“We go in with a campaign where we work with the local retailers in that city,” Griessel says. “We have local tasting events, and we’ll often have a big tasting event with the ‘somms’ (sommeliers), and this type of campaign will go on for a couple of months.
“Other times we’ll bring in the top 40 or 50 influencers (usually wine critics and sommeliers) to Washington from around the country.”
While the size of Washington’s production may pale in comparison to California’s, the state’s Wine Commission has 102,000 followers on Facebook; the third highest number for any wine organization in the world, and much higher than the account for Napa Valley.
The Wine Commission itself is a critical aspect of Washington’s success, Griessel says, as it acts as a central organizing body for marketing and research. Membership in the Wine Commission is mandatory in Washington State, and members contribute $12 per ton of grapes and 8 cents per gallon of wine to the Wine Commission, which currently has a $5.5 million annual budget.
Members are represented by a board of 13 directors, all drawn from the industry, with five seats for growers, five for wine producers, one for distributors, one for the Dept. of Agriculture, and one for non-vinifera producers.
In addition to marketing, Griessel says a tight focus on enology research is seen as key. The Wine Commission and its members recently raised $25 million to establish the Viticulture and Enology program at Washington Statue University as one of the most advanced wine research centres in the world.
Again, Griessel says cooperation, not competition, was key to the project’s success.
“If you really want to change the world, you have to work together,” he said.