Winery Brand Positioning: Answering “What Do We Do?” and “Why Do We Do it?”
The functional offering gets a winery noticed. The purpose behind it is what gets a winery chosen.
When it comes to branding and marketing (and the winery business), what a winery does is the functional offering — the wines, the varietals, the tasting experience, the property itself. Why a winery does it, is the purpose behind that offering. These are the core elements of your unique value propositions (UVP) and brand strategy: the belief, philosophy, or conviction that explains why your winery made this way and not another way. Most wineries can answer the first question fluently. Far fewer can answer the second one specifically enough for it to function as a competitive advantage, and that gap is where a lot of winery marketing quietly underperforms.
This is one of a series of posts built around the seven questions that make up a real winery brand strategy (and the development of a UVP). Along with the cornerstone post and the piece on brand identity versus visual identity, this post covers "What do we do" and "why do we do it." They are grouped together here because they only function as a competitive advantage when they're answered as a pair.
"What Do We Do" is the Easier Question (but sometimes not so easy)
Ask a winery what they do, and the answer comes fast: we grow this varietal, we produce this style, we offer tastings and tours, we host events. It's accurate, but it's also close to interchangeable with the answer from most other wineries in the region.
The miss happens if a winery stops at this high level and jumps right in to marketing. A winery that leads its marketing entirely with the functional offering is competing on the same terms as every other property nearby, which usually means competing on price, convenience, or whoever has the biggest marketing spend that quarter, or the most appealing curbside appeal. None of those are durable brand advantages, and none of them are why a guest actually remembers a winery after the visit.
"Why Do We Do It" is Where Wineries Can Get Vague
This is one of the key questions that I see many business owners struggle with (not just wineries), and the pattern is consistent. The first attempt to answer is usually some version of "because we're passionate about wine" or "because we love this land." Genuine sentiment, ususally true, but also not specific enough to differentiate from any other winery that could say the exact same thing.
A "why" that functions strategically has to be specific to your winery's actual decisions. Some examples of what a specific stance looks like in practice could be:
A winery farming organically not because it's trend-aligned, but because the founder inherited a piece of land degraded by decades of conventional viticulture and made a deliberate bet on rebuilding the soil.
A winery producing a narrow range of wines by design, refusing to chase every varietal that performs well in the region, because the philosophy is depth over breadth and these vines came from the old country.
A winery built specifically to challenge an assumption about the region — proving a varietal or style can succeed somewhere it wasn't expected to.
Each of those is a "why" that couldn't be swapped onto a different winery very easily. That's the test. If your stated reason for doing what you do could just as easily belong to the winery down the road, it isn't specific enough yet to do any strategic brand differentiation work. In that case, you have to go deeper.
Why this Pair of Questions is a Competitive Advantage, Not Just a Talking Point
Guests and trade buyers are increasingly wine-literate. This means that the genuine specifics of your unique story is what earns attention (and what earns repeat visitation and word of mouth recommendations). A guest can't feel connected to "we're passionate about winemaking." They can feel connected to a specific, well-articulated story about why a winery exists that they haven't heard from three other vineyards that same weekend.
This is also where the "how do we do it" question (covered in another post in this series), starts to matter. The "why" makes a claim. The "how" is the proof that the claim is real and not just a nice sentence on the About Us page.
Where the Gap Usually Comes From
In my experience, this gap isn't a lack of conviction. I find that most winery owners have a genuine, specific reason that they do what they do. It's just that the reason has never been asked for directly, or written down, or tested against the question "could this apply to any other winery?" It lives as an instinct and not as a stated position.
The point of this exercise isn't to invent a why from nothing. It's meant to extract one that's already there and sharpening it until it's specific enough to hold up as part of your brand story. And then ensuring it’s shared and understood by every employee – especially the ones who are customer facing or who manage your marketing and PR.
A Winery Value Proposition is a Collection of Thoughtful Components
This post is part of my series on the seven questions behind the creation of a compelling winery brand strategy and value proposition. The next one is: how you do it, which covers the process and standards that back up the why and turn it from a claim into proof. If you want to see how your winery's current "what" and "why" hold up against this level of specificity, that's exactly the kind of gap my Marketing and Brand Audit is designed to uncover.
See more posts about winery brand strategy.
Mike Belobradic brings 30 years of executive marketing and brand leadership in HNW wealth management and luxury travel to winery and tourism brand strategy, backed by WSET wine and spirits credentials, formal culinary training, and standing as a KCBS-certified barbecue judge.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why isn't describing our wines and tasting experience enough for winery marketing?
Describing the functional offering of varietals, tasting experience, and property features, for example, is necessary, but it’s not the end of defining a brand. It’s normal that wineries in a given region share a similar functional offering, so leading with this alone puts a winery in direct competition on price or convenience, rather than on what actually makes it distinct. The "why" behind the offering is what creates differentiation.
What makes a winery's "why" specific enough to be a competitive advantage?
A strong "why" is a stance tied to actual decisions the winery has made, not a general sentiment. A useful test: if the stated reason could be swapped onto a different winery without sounding false, it isn't specific enough. A specific "why" usually references a particular history, belief, or deliberate choice that shaped how the winery operates.
How do I find our winery's "why" if it's never been written down?
In most cases, the "why" already exists as an instinct behind decisions the winery has made, it just hasn't been articulated directly. Working backward from specific choices (why this varietal, why this farming approach, why this style) usually helps to uncover a more specific and defensible answer than starting from a general statement about passion for wine.
Should "what we do" and "why we do it" be communicated together in marketing?
Generally yes. The "what" alone reads as a commodity description, and the "why" alone can read as an unsupported claim. Paired together, and later backed up by the "how," they form the basis of a positioning statement that's both distinct and credible.