US Wholesale Masterclass w/ Pete Przybylinski, The Duckhorn Portfolio (Part 2)

Having helped grow Duckhorn from $5M to $500M in revenue and the sales team from 1 to >100 people, Pete Przbylinksi, former Chief Sales Officer of The Duckhorn Portfolio for nearly 30 years, has a deep understanding of managing US wholesale markets. In part two, Pete discusses selling into on- and off-premise chains, pricing, marketing, and more. Detailed Show Notes: Selling on-premise takes more time, need to present the wine, sell 1 case at a time, but more marketing value ROI skews towards off-premise if you ignore brand equity Calera / Kosta Browne targeted 65-70% on-premise, but hard to enforce Can’t tell distributor where to sell since they own the product If retailer asks for it, some states legally require it be offered Selling off-premise chains Rely very little on distributor, need to build relationship on your own If brand is small, can use agents/brokers or distributors to get initial discussions Takes patience and perseverance, and need a compelling story Big retailers don’t care about the winemaking process, they care that customers will buy the wine In-store displays Retail product managers fight with each other for displays If displays don’t deliver value, they will lose floor space to others Constellation research: most product pulled from shelf, not displays; displays act as powerful billboard for shoppers Shelf placement Cold box similar to displays - limited real estate, hard to get in and get the desirable locations Need to communicate to wholesaler merchandising teams where you’d like to be (e.g. - x shelf next to y competitor); need to keep message simple Stick w/ message for ~2 years, takes a long time to see impact, needs patience Large on-premise accounts Look at ACV (volume) to identify top targets Similar to off-premise with limited real estate (wine list slots) and they need the wine to sell Can take fewer wines vs off-premise (2-4 max) Longer lead times, programs can be 1-2 years, need to be ready when windows open BTG great, but creates some pricing complications Need to show up where buyers are, e.g. - major events like Pebble Beach or Aspen Food & Wine Decoy’s success driven by off-premise Safeway in CA launched brand, then went to other regions and retailers and grew from there Duckhorn brand equity gave Decoy a springboard to launch, but was able to stand alone and now most Decoy drinkers don’t know the tie to Duckhorn Price increases Get all the data you can (competitor, consumer behavior, demand elasticity) The nuances of consumers and differences in brand equity are impactful Any decisions take time, may not affect retailers for ~120 days, could take 6-12 months before you see an impact Discounting Key for the grocery channel Discounting should be done after all other options exhausted The more it happens, customers think that’s the price of the product, erodes brand equity Impact of marketing on sales Duckhorn did very little traditional marketing, mostly sales support (spent ~1.5-2% of revenue) LVMH spends ~30% on marketing, CPG average is ~10% of revenue Did some testing of advertising in 1 market for 1 year and measured impact to determine if it should be expanded Partnerships w/ other products good for grocery channel, can often secure displays Advice for a tough wine market Set up production to align w/ honest and believable sales plan Long-term impacts of cutting opex will hurt growing the top-line Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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US Wholesale Masterclass w/ Pete Przybylinski, The Duckhorn Portfolio (Part 2) is an episode from XChateau Wine Podcast by Robert Vernick.

This episode is 35:18 long.

This episode was published on Dec 23, 2025.

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