To Our Colleagues and Friends,
We write you today to share our excitement about a journey that started around a conversation about LIVE, our shared commitment to building sustainable communities, and the extended communities to whom we sell our wines.
A year ago a group of LIVE certified wineries met informally to consider how we could create a marketing program for our LIVE wines that would provide an incentive for wineries and vineyards to commit to LIVE certification beyond ‘just doing the principled thing.’
We undertook this effort as certified wineries, outside the auspices of the LIVE organization. We feel that this separation between the certification program and the marketing program is critical to maintaining the integrity of the third-party structure. However, the LIVE staff and Board of Directors have supported and encouraged our efforts and have been collaborative and kept informed throughout.
Most of us struggle with competing demands for our time and money, so creating and funding a whole new marketing program was not undertaken lightly. But in the end, we all felt that LIVE, if communicated effectively and meaningfully, provides context that has until now gone underutilized – a framework for sharing a truly unique life-history of wines from a great region.
We invited Cole Danehower to work with us to develop our marketing program because, as many of you may recall, Cole so poignantly called LIVE wineries and vineyards to action at the LIVE annual meeting in 2012. He saw that the lack of understanding in the marketplace was a missed opportunity for LIVE wines and the Pacific Northwest as a region, because truly, LIVE speaks to what this wine Community is all about.
Over the last nine months, Cole has helped us to develop a precise, comprehensive, and usable marketing plan for those LIVE wines that are produced in certified wineries throughout the Pacific Northwest. Cole’s work consists of a new consumer-facing website, consumer-friendly messaging, tasting room and sales staff training for certified wineries, and a PR and social media strategy.
We are excited to share this work with all of you at the 2015 LIVE Annual Meeting, to be held on April 7th at the Allison Inn & Spa. You can register for this event at liveannual.eventbrite.com.
Please join us to learn more about this work! For those of you who cannot make it in person, we will distribute Cole’s presentation afterwards along with specifics of how to get involved.
Sincerely,
LIVE Wines Steering Committee:
David Adelsheim, Adelsheim Vineyards
Eugenia Keegan, Jackson Family Wines
Pat Dudley, Bethel Heights Vineyard
Mimi Casteel, Bethel Heights Vineyard
