Introducing The Study of Allocated Wine Offerings

For over a decade now, we’ve been working closely with allocation-model wineries. Throughout that time, we’ve seen evidence of trends, tendencies, and the levers that can be pulled to make a difference. While an individual winery may know their own metrics like the back of their hand, getting the context – and statistical significance – of a larger universe has largely been out of reach. High-end, allocated producers are an incredibly important segment of the wine industry, but to date have been woefully understudied.

At Offset, we’ve been in an interesting position – through processing thousands of allocation offerings across a wide range of wineries, we house data that would likely reveal great insights into the allocation model. Anecdotally, we’ve learned a tremendous amount, and often work one-on-one with producers to help them better understand how to optimize their allocations. Yet we have hesitated to pursue broad analysis of the data as like many wineries, we are too close to the data to be truly objective. So while we may be ideal people to ask questions, we respect data too much to think that we are the right people to answer the questions.

“Who are the right people to answer the questions?” you are surely thinking. Unbiased, objective, seasoned researchers. So when our friend and luxury wine specialist Peter Yeung (Master of Wine candidate and co-author of the book Luxury Wine Marketing) approached us with his intent to study the allocated model in collaboration with researchers from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, we jumped on board.

In our role as a strategic and data partner for the study, we have been working with Peter and the Kellogg team to help identify areas of potential inquiry. For Offset Commerce clients who choose to opt-in to the study, the Kellogg research team will be able to securely access their data via our API. Our hands will be off of any analysis, but we look forward to partnering with our participating clients during the Test & Experiment phase of the study. And of course, we are excited to learn what the data can tell us and what the researchers discover, and to share those learnings with this industry that we are dedicated to and apply them to our own work and platform.

To learn more and sign-up to participate, please visit their dedicated website: The Study of Allocated Wine Offerings. It is worth reiterating that this is a purely Opt-In study, and not limited to Offset clients. No data will be shared without express permission.

We will answer any questions we can, and are happy to connect you to Peter and the team as appropriate to maintain the integrity of the study.