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Paul Wagner offers a wisely considered and pragmatic view of the North American wine market

The President of Balzac Communications & Marketing provides some of the main keys to successfully undertake exporting of wine to the North American market

It is quite evident that the North American expert not only has a lot of data and extensive information about the reality of North American wine market, but also the necessary experience to extract what is most significant from this information and give it its due importance.

His lecture, apart from entertaining and dynamic, and not less serious because of this, started with a basic description of the North American market, a market that has been constantly growing since the year 1996 - even despite the crisis, as sales in the first three months of 2009 have increased in 6.4% - and in which 13% of consumers are drinking 86% of the bottles.

Added to this is the scarce harvest of 2008 that has obligated importers to go in search of wines from out of the country to satisfy the demand, apart from the fact that the population in the United States does nothing but increase, as is likewise the case with consumption of wine per capita; and then we have the so-called "Millennium Generation", in which 70 million young people are included who are far more interested in wine than the generations that preceded them.

Other information of importance refers to the fact that in the United States at least 60,000 labels are commercialized. Or the fact that in most states there are only two or three relevant importers, who handle between 1000 and 5000 brands and whose commercial agents visit an average of 10-15 clients a day.

Wagner's first conclusion is that the competition is overwhelming, thus the need to go in search of a differentiating characteristic is an imperative one. The second conclusion, perhaps the most important, is that we have to understand the consumer better: "Nobody teaches you what music you have to listen to, nor do they explain the type of strings that a guitarist uses. You simply listen to what you like", Wagner affirms, assuring that this is exactly what we should do with wine.

In like manner the expert states that it will be necessary to change the way Europe focuses on wine-tourism and more importance should be given to sales through the Internet as a good alternative for the smaller wineries.