June 30 marked the end of the OWB’s 2017-18 fiscal year. In the upcoming year, the OWB team and Directors will be reviewing and revising our three-year strategic plan to guide how we focus our efforts and how your tax dollars are allocated across our programming. Here’s your chance to tell us how you think we’re doing, and what you’d like to see done differently in the future.
Help us make sure we’re meeting your needs by spending five minutes giving us feedback in our annual industry satisfaction survey. At the end of the survey, you will also have the option to provide more specific input on viticulture and enology research to inform the strategic program review program we’ll be undertaking this year.
And while we hope that the opportunity to give anonymous, candid feedback is enough of a draw, we’re sweetening the offer by giving you a shot at some 2019 Symposium packages, which include a full-access pass and one night hotel stay in Portland. These packages will go to three randomly selected winners who complete the survey by July 20.
START THE SURVEY
As you consider your survey answers, keep in mind this sample of what the OWB team delivered in the past 12 months:
- We welcomed 242 members of the trade and media and 279 consumers to our Oregon Wine Trail educational and tasting event in Los Angeles in April, including a full-to-capacity Master Class exploring all of Oregon’s major wine regions.
- We hosted 15 journalists and brought them to visit vineyards and meet winemakers from all of Oregon’s major wine-producing regions. These writers spanned the globe, hailing from Japan to New York to Denmark, and represented publications including The Wine Advocate, Wine Folly, Forbes Magazine, The Robb Report, The Seattle Times, Great Northwest Wines, SevenFifty Daily and more.
- We launched the first version of the Grape and Wine Profit Calculator to help vineyard and winery owners develop better business plans and sponsored workshops around the state to introduce this new tool to the industry.
- We sponsored an educational lunch and tasting for 150 wine professionals at the 2017 TEXSOM conference focused on white wines from around the state, and coordinated free shipping for wineries submitting to the 2018 TEXSOM International Wine Awards. This resulted in increased awareness of Southern Oregon among TEXSOM educators, who will devote a seminar to that region at their 2018 conference next month.
- We produced our annual Oregon Wine Symposium with a record 1,371 attendees.
- We allocated a record $437,500 to viticulture and enology research projects for the coming year, which includes a recurring portion of the industry’s grape tax money supplemented for the first time by an historic allocation for the Oregon wine industry from the Oregon General Fund.
- We worked with GuildSomm to produce a video highlighting the diversity of winegrowing throughout Oregon, and shared that video and GuildSomm’s Oregon podcast with 2,000 trade members through our Trade Newsletter. With nearly 86,000 downloads, the podcast episode is currently the fourth most-downloaded podcast in GuildSomm’s library of over 60 podcasts.
- We hosted 36 international buyers in Oregon, organized opportunities for wineries to connect with importers and buyers in 4 countries in Asia and Europe, and repeated our wildly popular Taste Oregon event in Toronto.
- We expanded Oregon Wine Month efforts this year, reaching more than 70 distributors in 35 states and growing our consumer contact list by an additional 9,100 contacts.
- We conducted and released the first Salary and Labor Survey specific to the Oregon wine industry.
