Afternoon Brief: Alecia Moore, Winemaker and Two Wolves Wine Founder, Announced as Keynote Speaker for 2025 Unified Wine & Grape Symposium

The Unified Wine and Grape Symposium is proud to welcome Alecia Moore, winemaker and founder of Two Wolves Wine, as the keynote luncheon speaker to kick off the 2025 show on Tuesday, January 28...

The Australian ‘Black Summer’ of 2019/20, which saw bushfires destroy swathes of vineyard land across the country was a dramatic reminder of the growing challenges facing winemakers around the world. We spoke to leading Australian winemakers and lab technicians to find out how agile decision-making is helping to deal with the consequences of global warming. Offering alarming proof of the escalating effects of climate change, in November 2019 bushfires blazed through New South Wales, scorching more than five million hectares of land following Australia’s hottest and driest year on record. In December 2019, the fires swept through the Adelaide Hills, destroying 650 ha of vines in the region, and wiping out entire vineyards. Making matters worse, the smoke from the fires was far-reaching, rendering vineyard plots from Canberra to the Hunter Valley useless. Ravaging an estimated 24.3 million hectares of land in total and destroying over 3,000 buildings, the September 2019

The wine marketplace continues its post-pandemic shifts.  By Laurie Wachter The August 24 Wine Industry Sales Symposium consisted of four sessions covering the value of DTC and sales data in boosting sales, planning for the holidays, corporate gifting and luxury marketing strategy. Here’s a quick look back. Using Data Analytics to Optimize DTC Pricing and Inventory Depletion Costs have risen exponentially since the onset of the pandemic, making it even more critical to use data analytics to guide wine pricing to maximize profits.  “Wineries have an amazing amount of data from their POS systems and wine clubs that can be used to build a depletion curve, price elasticity estimates and predictive models,” says Bob Terzotis of Mather Economics.  Jim Moroney reached out to Mather after opening Sixmilebridge Vineyards (Paso Robles, Calif.) during the pandemic. “We were running out of Cabernet Sauvignon partway into our first vintage. I needed to raise t