The debate over the utility of using points, reviews, and awards in your DtC marketing efforts has been ongoing for decades. Some folks hate the 100-point rating system, some wineries have built successful brands with scores and review, while others have been burned by them. Nonetheless, from the moment the eCELLAR platform launched, clients have asked for ways to easily incorporate review, ratings, and awards into their product database because they still play an important role for some producers.
A Brief History of Wine Reviews and Scores
While awards earned at wine competitions have been with the industry forever, wine reviews and scores took off and were embrace by wineries, retailers and, importantly, consumers beginning in the 1980s. The Wine Spectator and Robert Parker, Jr’s The Wine Advocate were the most important proponents of the 100-point score. Many others followed their lead, while others stuck to different rating system such as puffs, stars and other scales for rating wine. Today, the power of points has lessened from its heyday in the early 2000s, but they are still used by the most important wine reviewers and critics.
The primary critique of the 100-point scale as well as other systems is two-fold: 1) many consider the point system to be entirely too precise, pointing out that no one knows the difference between a 90-point wine and a 91-point wine. 2) There is concern of what appears to be obvious “grade inflation” over the past decade or so whereby the number of 95–100-point scores have proliferated, making them so common as to mean very little.
Nonetheless, many wineries as well as retailers will still make the case that reviews, scores and competition awards are still very useful because consumers use them to understand the huge and confusing number of wines from which they can choose.
Including Reviews and Awards in eCELLAR Product Pages
It’s for this latter reason that eCELLAR provides easy ways for its partner wineries to incorporate reviews into their product database and product pages. eCELLAR’s platform provides three locations in the product database that make sense to promote a winery’s awards, reviews and ratings.
On the individual product pages, awards, reviews, and ratings can be placed in the “Short Description”, “Long Description”, “Secondary Notes”, and “Reviews” sections.
If you have a longer review of a wine to which you want to expose shoppers, it is probably best to include it in the Long Description or Secondary Notes sections where you can also place any points attached to the review. The Short Description and Review sections of the product pages are best to place limited references to a score and its publisher or an award (i.e.: “Gold Medal”) along with the competition that presented the award. Whether you believe your DtC sales will be helped or hindered by the promotion of reviews and scores is of course up to you. eCELLAR is only concerned that if you choose to use scores, points and awards in your DtC marketing, you have a means to do so in your eComm/POS platform.
