nzwinehome, an online wines sale site set up to enable New Zealand winemakers to sell wine overseas, has partnered with business intelligence and analytics company, Mero to provide an analytics service, nzwinemetrics, to help winemakers boost overseas sales.
nzwinehome provides a packaging and delivery service for producers, including managing customs, taxes and other requirements of the destination country. Its founder Grant Rimmer and the manager of its direct to international consumer sales (DITC) channel, Geoff Wilson have jointly set up nzwinemetrics.
The service “combines direct wine sales data with export and tourism industry data, finding overlaps that clarify market trends and answer critical questions for producers.”
Wilson said: “We’re not data or tech specialists – we partnered with Mero to select the right analytics solution and align it to our software. This includes full support with data cleansing, extraction and analysis.
“Mero extracts and transforms raw data using a variety of tools – including open source tools to reduce cost. Mero loads the cleansed data into a cloud-based Microsoft Azure database, then uses Microsoft Power BI and SQL Server for reporting.”
He added: “Mero has gone the extra mile to help us deliver analytics that are right on the money. For us, the whole process has been quite painless.”
Wilson said producers want to know how their performance compares to their peers. “They ask which destinations internationally hold the most value and pay price premiums. When we tell them where they are relative to other vineyards in the region and nationally, the most common reaction is ‘Wow, I’m actually underselling.’ They are sometimes surprised that there’s no immediate ceiling within the [direct to international consumer] channel.
According to Wilson, winemakers frequently undersold on both price and volume in comparison to their peers. “For example, Australia is our largest DTIC market at approximately 40 percent. If a vineyard is only at 30 percent, why? Are they not marketing correctly to the Australian market, or not capitalising on closing opportunities?”
nzwinemetrics sells its information on a subscription basis along with other bespoke DTIC sales advisory services. It also offers a free high-level national overview, and a further two levels of deeper detail for individual producers.