‘Tis the Season: When You're in Wine...

If you’re an accountant, your busy season is coming to a post-tax day close. If you’re in finance, the end of each quarter seems to mean the end of sleep. In higher education? I don’t envy you at finals time.

In the New York wine scene, ‘busy season’ traditionally means September and October. These are the months when wine brands or importers, in the case of imports - which is to say most of our client brands – sell into the restaurants and retail stores, which do their heaviest business over the holidays in the two months that follow. Q4 or ‘OND’ is a festive and frenetic period of portfolio tastings and long workdays for our partners in restaurants and wine retail.

For us, the wine season is September. In September, we don’t sleep much. To a wine-soaked calendar of portfolio tastings and industry dinners, we add Emmy Awards season, of which our client, Ferrari Trento, is the sparkling wine sponsor. And then there is Ferrari Trentodoc Camp, a four-day immersion experience in the Italian Alps. September is High Intensity Interval Training for professional wine lovers.

Then our plates are filled again (often literally) with oatmeal season from November to March. This is the busy season for our client, Flahavan’s Irish Oats, characterized by oatmeal sampling in ski resorts and supermarkets, creative sessions in the test kitchen with chefs and an annual St. Patrick’s Day campaign.

But this year, wine season came back in Q1 to New York. The smattering of portfolio, regional and thematic tastings that used to dot late January has grown into a serious promotional period that stretches right up to the start of the European trade shows of Prowein in March, Vinitaly in April and Vinexpo in May. The highlight this year New York calendar was surely Vinexpo NY, which will be back in force in 2019.