The Grapevine

Palate Calibration Marketing

March 15th, 2017

Here’s an idea inspired by a post on Wine Pages website in the UK. It will help your customers understand their palates while you learn more about their preferences. That’s good wine shop marketing![level-members]

The idea is pretty simple. In Tom Cannavan’s words,

Each person purchased the same wine, tasted it, and rated it using specific criteria. The idea was to calibrate our palates: we would gather the ratings and tasting notes from each participant, compare them, and discover how our assessment of a wine’s quality compared to others’ assessment. The findings were published on wine-pages with some basic statistical analysis to determine averages and so on.

The best part of this exercise is that it has value for you as a marketer and for your more curious customers. They get to compare their own tastes to the broader tastes of the community. And you, in addition to getting to perhaps sell a bottle of wine to the participants, also get some pretty detailed information about their reaction to the wine you choose.

That information includes tasting notes – nose, mouthfeel, etc. – but also more market-based reactions – would you buy this again? Would you buy it at this price again?

You can see the full article here with the details of the information being gathered. And if you’d like help setting up a form to take in this information, please let us know. We’d be happy to help, either through your website or via Google Docs.

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