It seems like everyone’s talking about experience. It has become the go-to term to express the idea of sharing with your client, your buyer, with the end-customer who wants to tour your winery.

But what are we really referring to when we use the concept experience and why should it be of such key importance?

I have tried to summarise in three points the key actions to take in order to help you put together the most effective experience you want your visitor to have.

1.   Carefully define what experience actually means in your winery, and how you want your visitor to feel while there.

The term Experience entered our active vocabulary from the digital and design sectors (user experience=UX), where it referred to the design modality and ease of use that made it possible for the user, through technology, to successfully interact with a technological tool and actually enjoy the process, through being emotionally and aesthetically involved in a positive way. So from that, it was just a small step to speak of experience without involving any technological process.  

To craft an experience means to design in a coherent, effective way the emotional journey that we want the visitor to live; to find, that is, the perfect syntony between the complex of time + action + narrative that we want to create out of our own reality/business + the visitor’s personal involvement.

Knowing how to handle all these aspects and weave them together into a fluid, seamless process is the first important step to take.

2.   Don’t think that a hi/story is the same thing as storytelling; biography is not the magic of an encounter enlivened with a story.

This happens every time a client wants to narrate—in some kind of timeline—the main events that their family lived through, as though a biography itself were the one fixed anchorpoint of the prestige of the winery and the narration were a full immersion into the life of the winery and its products.  But that doesn’t, in fact, always work, and when it doesn’t, the question to ask is not What didn’t I say and what should I have added? Rather, it is What did I not understand about my visitor, about that individual standing in front of me and with whom I want to establish contact, who I want to fall in love with my wines, to enter so deeply into my world that he will become a promoter of my brand? This is what didn’t work: you didn’t establish an effective contact. You didn’t create a common ground that the visitor could sink his roots into. To achieve this, storytelling has nothing to do with the biography of your company.

Try to find that shared space where your eyes can meet. Try to find narrative elements that are authentic but at the same time speak the same language of your visitor.

3.   What can I do to become unforgettable in the mind of my visitor?

While you are creating the procedure for arriving at your winery, think carefully about this: what are the life and habits of the person who is coming to visit me? How exactly will he get here? And above all, give thought to what will happen after his arrival. Where can your wines be found? Where are they found on a restaurant wine list?  Who are your partners and friends, those the consumer can approach and feel part of your world?

These and similar questions can be of fundamental importance for creating meaningful experience. And don’t think that to fashion a successful experience you have to have a Hollywood-level winecellar: authenticity will do nicely, and a strategic plan, and meticulous curation of it, where noting is left to chance.

If you’d like to talk about any of this, and to map out an experience custom-fit to your winery, maybe enjoying a glass of wine together, just write us: we’d love to hear what you have to say.