Wine & Spirits Marketing Agency

The three tiers are supplier, distributor, and retailer, and the tier a message comes from decides whether that message is legal. As a supplier you can talk about the wine, the vineyard, the winemaker, and the occasion. You cannot post a price, promote a retailer's promotion, or run a call to action for inventory you do not legally control. The retailer can post price and availability. The distributor sits in the middle and mostly speaks to trade, not to consumers. Almost every content problem we inherit comes from a brand writing retailer copy on a brand account.

Age-gating is not optional, and not a box you tick once at setup. Every platform profile, every paid audience floor, every DTC funnel, and every influencer post needs it, including pages you do not own. TTB lines govern label imagery and health or benefit claims, so a caption praising a wine for being light or clean can create a problem the creative team never saw coming. A real month of content ends up split like this.

• Brand-owned channels carry story, provenance, pairing, and occasion, with no price and no retailer call to action.
• Retailer-facing assets are produced separately and handed to the distributor or the chain, never published from the brand account.
• Paid media is split by market, because what is legal for DTC shipping in one state is not legal next door.
• Trade content runs on its own calendar and its own channels, aimed at buyers and sales reps rather than consumers.
• Every asset clears an age-gate check and a claims check before it is scheduled, not after a comment shows up.

Seasonality then sets the order of the year. Harvest content is shot and banked before the crush. Rose season is planned in winter, because shelf resets land months ahead of the first warm weekend. Holiday assets are approved in late summer, because retail programs lock long before December. A calendar built on compliance and season survives legal review. A calendar built on trends does not.

Both are long-run retainers, not campaigns, and both are run by the senior team that pitched them.

Gruppo Mezzacorona has been on retainer with us for ten years, covering five or more brands in their portfolio, and across that relationship we added roughly one million followers. The work is portfolio work: one senior team running several brands with different price points, audiences, and distributor footprints, without letting them blur into a single voice. Ten years also covers harvest cycles, holiday programs, packaging changes, and platform shifts, which is the part a one-year contract never reaches.

Kendall-Jackson is a multi-year partnership and still active. That work is premium positioning, which means the creative has to hold a price point rather than chase volume. The same senior team also runs value-tier brands. An agency that only works in luxury makes everything look expensive. An agency that only works in value discounts by instinct. Running both teaches you which levers move a bottle on a promotional endcap and which protect a bottle that should never be discounted.

The shape of the engagement is the same in both cases. The founder is on the account, and there is no junior account manager translating between you and the people doing the work. Month one is discovery only, so nothing is published before we understand the portfolio, the distributor map, and how legal review works on your side. Our average retainer runs more than three years, and these two are why that number holds.

We plan the distributor side as well as the brand side, because the founder built the function inside a distributor before he built the agency.

Lucas Vandenberg built the first marketing department at Southern Wine & Spirits starting in 2007, with zero prior wine industry experience. The result was a 15 percent average lift in case sales. He ran trade marketing across Walgreens, Kroger, CVS, and Target, and across more than 200 new account distributions. Fifty & Five opened in 2008 on top of that experience and has since managed 34 or more wine and spirits brands.

A distributor sales rep carries hundreds of items and has no reason to care about your follower count. What moves that rep is a reason to open the bag: a program that is easy to sell, an account that already asked for the item, point of sale material that needs no explaining, and a brand story short enough to survive a buyer meeting. Consumer marketing that never reaches the trade creates demand nobody in the chain is set up to fill.

• Trade communication is aimed at distributor managers, reps, and chain buyers. It leads with margin, velocity, and program dates.
• Consumer communication is aimed at the shopper. It leads with taste, occasion, provenance, and where to find the bottle.
• The two need different assets, channels, and timing, and they should never run from the same account.
• Sell-in and sell-through are planned together, so a chain authorization is supported by demand in that market rather than nationally.

If the agency you are interviewing cannot explain a depletion report, or why a shelf reset date sets your creative deadline, they are planning your year with half the information missing.

Our retainers run from $4,000 per month for ad management to $50,000 or more per month for full-service, always-on programs.

Scope moves the number, not seniority. The senior team is the same at both ends of the range.

• How many brands and how many SKUs sit inside the portfolio.
• How many markets you sell in, and how the DTC and distributor split falls across them.
• How much original photography and video the calendar needs each month.
• Whether trade assets and distributor support are in scope or handled internally.
• How much paid media is under management, and in how many countries.

What is not in the number matters too. No junior account management, no holding-company markup, no layer of people between you and the work. We run a senior and AI operating model, which is why a small team can carry a portfolio this size. Month one is discovery only, so the first invoice buys understanding rather than output nobody approved.

Ask questions that force specifics about compliance, staffing, and who touches the account.

1. Which tier are you writing for, and how do you keep those messages separate? A good answer treats brand, distributor, and retailer content as three work streams with three approval paths, not one calendar with a legal check at the end.
2. How do you handle age-gating across paid, organic, DTC, and influencer content? A good answer covers all four unprompted, including partner pages the agency does not own.
3. Who is on my account every week, and what is their title? A good answer names people and hours. If the senior people in the pitch are not the people doing the work, keep looking.
4. What have you done in wine or spirits, and for how long? A good answer names brands, gives the length of each relationship, and says what happened after year one, because anyone can show a launch.
5. How does the calendar change for harvest, the holidays, rose season, and shelf resets? A good answer comes back with lead times and dates, not themes.
6. What happens in month one? A good answer is discovery. An agency that starts publishing in week one is guessing about your portfolio and your legal review.
7. What is excluded from the retainer, and what gets billed separately? A good answer is a short, plain list naming media spend, production, and talent before you have to ask.