Winning wine consumers through community

The future of wine marketing is not about broadcasting messages louder or targeting consumers more aggressively. It is about community as part of a broader, modern way of operating.

As consumer expectations evolve, wineries are discovering that growth increasingly comes from enabling people to connect: with brands, with experiences, and with each other. The wineries winning today are those moving beyond one-to-one relationships and building many-to-many connections across their ecosystem.

Understanding the different types of communities

When we talk about community, it is important to recognize that not all communities are the same.Wineries engage with multiple types of communities, including:

• Internal communities: existing customers, wine club members, tasting room visitors, employees, and repeat buyers already connected to the brand
• External communities: social groups, food and lifestyle networks, creators, collectors, and platforms where wine conversations already exist
• Hybrid communities: moments where internal and external audiences intersect through events, collaborations, or shared experiences

Winning wineries are intentional about how they engage across all three, deciding when to build, when to participate, and when to connect the two.

From customers to communities

Most wineries still treat customers as individuals: one email address, one transaction, one visit at a time. Yet wine is inherently social. It is shared at tables, celebrations, dinners, and gatherings.Communities already exist within winery customer bases – they are simply invisible.

They form around shared behaviours and motivations: discovery-led drinkers, collectors, social hosts, sustainability-minded buyers, wine club members, tasting room regulars, or friends who routinely buy together. The opportunity lies in recognizing, activating, and enabling these micro-communities.

Build or tap into communities, or both

Wineries have two powerful options.They can build their own communities through wine clubs, member experiences, events, and digital spaces that create belonging and continuity.

Or they can tap into existing communities, partnering with food and lifestyle groups, creators, social organizers, collectors, and platforms where wine conversations already happen.

Building communities creates long-term brand equity and loyalty. Tapping into existing communities accelerates reach and relevance. The most forward-thinking wineries are deliberately doing both, and connecting internal and external audiences where it makes sense.

Digital communities are no longer optional

The modern wine consumer – particularly younger generations – is digitally savvy by default. They discover brands online, form opinions socially, and expect interaction beyond occasional, face-to-face events.While tasting rooms, dinners, and in-person experiences remain important, they are episodic. Community, by contrast, is continuous.

To stay relevant, wineries must enable online, community-like interactions that allow customers to engage with the brand, interact with each other, discover and discuss wine socially, and participate on their own terms.

Digital communities extend the tasting room into everyday life.

Activating the community you already have

One of the biggest missed opportunities in the wine industry is not a lack of customers – it is a lack of understanding of the customers wineries already have.

Most wineries sit on sizeable CRMs, yet many do not truly know who is in them. Customer records are often incomplete, poorly segmented, or treated as static lists rather than living communities. Engagement signals such as purchase history, tasting room visits, event attendance, website behavior, email opens and clicks, and social interactions are captured but rarely connected, analyzed, or acted upon.

As a result, customers remain isolated records instead of part of a connected network.

Activating community starts with evolving the CRM from a contact database into a dynamic understanding of behaviour and connection. When wineries bring together engagement signals – online and offline – they can see patterns: who buys together, who attends similar events, who responds to the same offers, and who is naturally forming micro-communities.

Community activation is not about acquiring more data. It is about using the data wineries already have to turn disconnected customers into engaged, participating communities.

Group Buying: community in action

One of the most powerful ways to activate community is by enabling customers to buy wine together.

This shift toward purchasing together has been identified and coined as social buying by Cobuyr – a behavior that reflects how people naturally discover, discuss, and decide on wine as part of a group rather than in isolation.

Technology such as group buying with split payments turns this behaviour into action, removing friction and making it easy for friends, families, and communities to purchase together – both online and offline.For consumers, this creates shared discovery, lower individual commitment, and a builds stronger sense of belonging.

For wineries, it delivers higher conversion, increased order value, improved retention, and community-driven growth.

Social buying becomes measurable when the right purchasing mechanics are in place.

Using data to reveal micro-communities

Communities do not need to be guessed at because they can be identified.

Data and analytics allow wineries to uncover micro-communities already forming within their customer base. These are not demographic segments, but behavioral clusters based on how people engage, purchase, and interact. This also includes location and proximity of consumers.

By identifying these micro-communities, wineries can tailor experiences, enable interaction, activate group purchasing, and communicate in ways that feel relevant and human.

Data does not replace intuition. It reveals patterns intuition alone cannot see.

Community is more than a strategy but it’s not the only one

Community is powerful, but it is not the sole answer.Community is more than a tactic or campaign; it is a way of operating. However, winning the modern wine consumer requires a modern, holistic approach that combines community with experience design, data, creativity, and operational agility.

At its core is the ability to understand consumers deeply, monitor shifts in behaviour, habits, and interests, and respond quickly as those shifts occur. Active communities surface insight and early signals of change, but advantage only comes when wineries can act on those signals in near real time.

Community is foundational. Agility is what turns it into advantage.

Technology as an enabler, not the point

Technology is not the story – community is.

Social buying is a trend and consumer behaviour, not a technology. It reflects how people naturally engage with wine together. Technology’s role is to enable that behaviour at scale.

Tools such as group buying with split payments remove friction from purchasing together, making it easy for communities to act collectively rather than individually.

Equally important are engagement tools that support and nurture communities over time. Data-driven email marketing, SMS, and real-time personalization allow wineries to prompt conversation, encourage participation, and maintain momentum between physical and digital moments, rather than relying on one-off campaigns.

When these tools are informed by data and analytics, engagement feels timely, relevant, and human. When technology is designed around connection rather than transactions, it amplifies engagement, strengthens community, and drives sustainable growth.

Embracing the next generation of DTC

Ultimately, winning the modern wine consumer requires wineries to embrace new, more experiential direct-to-consumer strategies.

Community-led engagement, social interaction, and digital experiences are no longer optional additions to DTC; they are becoming core expectations. To deliver these experiences consistently, wineries need modern DTC capabilities built on strong data foundations and real-time insight.

Data and analytics provide the understanding, revealing how consumers behave, how communities form, and how preferences evolve. AI makes this understanding actionable, enabling wineries to respond quickly, personalise engagement at scale, and turn insight into meaningful commercial outcomes.

The wineries that succeed will be those that treat DTC not simply as a sales channel, but as a living, evolving relationship with their customers powered by data, enabled by AI, and brought to life through community based experiences.