Why 87% of Wineries Are Still Stuck Sending PDFs (And How AI Is Changing Everything)

The wine industry runs on PDFs.

Every winery knows the routine: compile your portfolio, attach the PDF, send it to 20 buyers, wait two weeks. Maybe one responds. Maybe.

Last week, a German winery using our AI sent 300 personalised emails in six languages. They booked meetings with buyers in Taiwan, Brazil, and even locally in Germany. They spent 15 minutes approving the outreach.

The difference isn't effort. It's leverage.

At Good Pair Days, where I helped build a platform serving over 80,000 monthly subscribers, we received hundreds of winery emails every month. Most came with 12-page PDFs—tasting notes, vineyard photos, the works.

But the wineries that caught our attention? They did something different. They knew we specialised in natural and minimal intervention wines. They'd noticed we'd just featured Slovenian producers. They offered exactly three wines that filled a gap in our upcoming Spanish collection.

They knew what we needed before we asked. But that kind of research takes hours per buyer, and who has that time when you're running a winery?

Here's what's changing: technology finally understands wine.

AI can now track when a Stockholm retailer adds a natural wine section. When a São Paulo importer searches for organic Macedonian wines. When a Taipei hotel updates their wine list to include more sustainable producers.

More importantly, it can reach out to them in their language, at their timezone, with exactly the information they need.

One of our wineries told me yesterday: "In 24 hours we had a sommelier from a large Hotel chain asking to sample our wines. Before this, reaching international buyers was almost impossible."

Not expensive. Not difficult. Almost impossible.

The best part? This doesn't replace relationships. It creates them.

A Romanian winemaker sent me a handwritten note last week thanking me for connecting them with a buyer in Japan. The human connection is still there—it just started with AI doing what AI does best: finding the right person at the right time.

Think about what you do when a lead comes in:

• Verify they're legitimate

• Understand their needs

• Match your wines to their preferences

• Calculate shipping to their country

• Write a personalised response

• Follow up appropriately

This is a system. And systems can be automated, leaving you to do what only you can do: make great wine and build real relationships.

The wineries winning today aren't necessarily making better wine than you. They're just better at getting it in front of the right people.

The good news? That's about to change. The tools that were only available to large distributors—market intelligence, automated outreach, multilingual communication—are now accessible to every winery.

Your wine deserves to be discovered. Now it can be.