How Wine Importers Manage Copy for 100+ SKUs

Nobody talks about the copy problem in wine importing.

They talk about logistics, compliance, margin pressure, and supplier relationships. But somewhere in the run-up to every catalogue, every new arrival mailing, every trade fair, there's a moment when someone — usually the marketing manager, sometimes the operations lead, occasionally the MD — has to sit down and write copy for a hundred wines they may or may not have tasted.

This is that article.

What the copy process actually looks like

At most small to mid-size import businesses, the marketing copy process goes something like this:

A new season's arrivals land. There are between 30 and 200 new or refreshed SKUs. Each needs at minimum a tasting note, a shelf talker, and a trade description. Often a food pairing too.

The wine team has tasting notes from some of the producers — in French, Italian, Spanish, or occasionally English that doesn't quite translate. Some producers send nothing. Some send a paragraph of winemaker philosophy that contains no useful sensory information.

The marketing manager — who is also handling the website, the social channels, the customer newsletter, the trade fair logistics, and three supplier visits — now needs to produce professional copy for all of these wines before catalogue print.

The options are:

1. Write it yourself — accurate to the wine, slow, exhausting at volume
2. Use the producer notes — fast, but inconsistent in quality and often unusable as-is
3. Brief a freelancer — expensive, turnaround of 1–2 weeks, briefing overhead for each wine
4. Use a generic AI tool — fast, but produces generic output that doesn't reflect your portfolio's voice or the wine's specific character

Most businesses use some combination of all four, applied inconsistently, under time pressure.

The real cost of getting it wrong

Poor copy doesn't just look bad. It has commercial consequences.

Retail: A weak shelf talker means a buyer keeps reaching for the familiar bottle. The wine sits. The retailer loses confidence in the range. It comes off the shelf.

On-trade: A tasting note that reads like a marketing brochure gets a raised eyebrow from a sommelier. They pass. The wine doesn't make the list.

Trade: A vague wholesale description gives a buyer nothing to work with. They move on to the next portfolio.

The sum of these small failures, across a catalogue of 100 wines, is a meaningful drag on commercial performance — mostly invisible because no single bad note kills a wine, but cumulatively real.

The consistency problem

Consistency matters as much as quality.

When 200 tasting notes come from different sources — some written by the winery, some by a freelancer, some by the marketing manager at midnight, some translated from French — the range as a whole feels incoherent. The vocabulary is different. The structure is different. The register shifts between professional and casual without warning.

Buyers and sommeliers notice. They may not say so directly, but inconsistent copy signals an operation that hasn't fully thought through its range.

What a good process looks like

The importers who get copy right at scale tend to share a few practices:

They standardise the input. Before any copy is written, every wine has the same structured data: grape, region, vintage, ABV, production method, winemaker notes (however brief). No copy is attempted without this minimum.

They separate technical review from copy writing. Someone who knows the wines checks the facts. Someone who can write handles the copy. These are often different people, or at minimum different tasks.

They work from a house style. One decision — sommelier-register for all on-trade facing copy, retail tone for consumer facing, trade language for sell sheets — applied consistently across the whole catalogue.

They build a library. Copy written for a wine this season is the foundation for next season. A library of previous notes, searchable by wine and format, means you're not starting from zero every cycle.

They accept first drafts. The perfect tasting note doesn't exist. A professional, accurate, channel-appropriate first draft that goes to print is worth infinitely more than a perfect note that misses the deadline.

Where AI fits in

AI generation has made the scale problem solvable in a way it wasn't two or three years ago.

The key is specificity. A generic prompt ("write a tasting note for a Burgundy Chardonnay") produces generic output. Structured input — grape, appellation, vintage, production method, winemaker notes — produces specific, usable copy that reflects the actual wine.

The limitation is accuracy. AI doesn't taste. It generates copy based on what's known about the inputs. If the inputs are good, the output is good. If you paste in a vague producer note and ask for a tasting note, you get a vague tasting note.

The workflow that works: structured input → AI-generated first draft → light review by someone who knows the wine → done. For a 100-SKU catalogue, this compresses weeks of work into days.

The catalogue deadline problem

Every importer knows this: copy is always the last thing to get done before print, and it always takes longer than the budget allowed.

The reason isn't that writing is hard. It's that the process is unstructured. Notes arrive from producers at different times. The person responsible for copy is waiting on tasting samples. Someone changed the range. The freelancer came back with notes that need revision.

Building the copy process into the product intake workflow — structured SKU data captured at import, not when the catalogue is due — is the single biggest change most operations can make. Copy becomes a byproduct of good product data, not a separate emergency project.

GlassNotes is built for this workflow: enter your SKU data once, generate all three copy formats (tasting note, shelf talker, wholesale one-liner) in any of three tones, and keep a versioned library of every copy you've generated. Free trial covers 5 wines, no credit card required.

Generate professional wine copy in seconds. Try GlassNotes free for 14 days — no credit card required.