Wine industry focus
How is the wine industry using AI?
The wine trade runs on trusted relationships, years of experience, human judgement, taste and timing. It is also weighed down by admin heavy manual processes, spreadsheets, email chains and disconnected systems.
Maintaining human expertise and relationships
We help wine businesses use AI and automation by removing this burden from day-to-day operations without losing human expertise and relationships that make the trade work. Ensuring security and efficiency in all processes.
Wine industry client testimonial
Mentzendorff Director talks about how iwantmore.ai helped embed AI across the business
Established over 160 years ago, Mentzendorff is one of the UK’s longest-established wine importers, offering a full-service agency model for 35 producers, including many of the world’s leading family-owned estates. In this case study we discuss:
- The immediate business benefits they saw after engaging with iwantmore.ai
- What the future of their business looks like after working with iwantmore.ai
What makes the wine industry different?
The wine industry is not one business model it is many, which overlap and operate at the same time, often inside the same company.
A broker trading secondary market stock, works very differently from a merchant holding physical inventory. Importers manage allocations; some volume driven and some extremely finite, complex taxes, duty rates and logistics. Private client specialists sell advice and timing as much as product. Investment focused sellers trade on scarcity and price movement. Many wine businesses combine several of these models at once.
A market defined by variability and exceptions
Wine products are unique by region, producer, vintage, format and condition. Availability changes constantly. Pricing is opaque and market driven. Stock may be physical, In Bond, held by an estate ‘En Primeur’, a supplier or only informally reserved.
To add to this complex environment, processes are rarely linear. Partial allocations, conditional purchases and relationship driven decisions are normal. Critical information lives in inboxes, spreadsheets and people’s heads.
This complexity is structural. Software built for standard retail or manufacturing struggles to cope. AI and automation only work in wine when it is designed around how the trade actually operates.
Typical challenges we see in the wine industry
Data silos
Stock lists held across different types of spreadsheets, ERP systems and inboxes.
Manual checking
Pricing decisions reliant on manual checks and individual knowledge.
Poor stock tracking
Limited visibility of what stock is available, what is selling, who is buying and why.
Limited reporting
Reporting that is manual, slow, static and out of date by the time it is read.
Lack of easily available information
Business critical information about all aspects of customer buying habits held in people’s heads, notebooks and email.
AI literacy
Employees have little experience or knowledge of how to use AI tools effectively.
How we help wine businesses use AI and automation
We start by taking technology out of the equation. We invest time in understanding your processes and the individuality of your business. We look at how buying, sales, marketing, finance and operations work today and only then start to look at how AI and automation solutions can support them.
It is important to remember AI will not replace your human judgement of wine quality, relationships that you’ve built and hold across the industry or your taste buds. It will instead remove the unnecessary work freeing up your company’s time, enabling your business to be more efficient, streamlined, productive and secure.
Typical examples of AI-driven improvements we provide to our wine sector clients:
Sales, marketing and client engagement
- AI assisted content creation in your company’s tone of voice and values
- Client segmentation based on buying behaviour, regions and styles
- Sales dashboards showing live performance by sales rep, client and wine
Buying and pricing intelligence improvement
- Natural language analysis of stock, pricing and historic sales data
- Predictive analytics of demand and pricing
- Automated alerts based on triggers like wines hitting drinking windows
Operations and finance automation
- Removal of manual data entry
- AI powered finance reporting
- Data security ensuring it adheres to legal and regulatory standards
- Automated handling of invoices, POs and expenses
AI literacy and tailored training for your team
It’s a costly mistake rolling out AI without your team knowing how to use it. We help you understand your team’s level of AI literacy and what they are thinking and feeling about AI, giving you a clear picture of what your change management challenge will be.
A dedicated and experienced training team
We train your team to use AI, enabling them to tackle time-consuming, admin-heavy tasks securely and in line with your business’s values, so they can spend more time doing what they do best – building relationships with suppliers, sourcing new business, or applying their judgement to a wine’s quality.
As a team we have trained employees at all organisational levels across hundreds of businesses, ensuring those firms get the best return on their AI investment, and can take advantage of the opportunities that AI presents.
Helping build more solid data foundations for AI
AI is only as effective as the data it can access. By creating a more connected and consistent data foundation, you can get more reliable insights from AI and build solutions that work across your business, rather than in isolated pockets.
Connecting your data to get more from AI
We help you bring together data from spreadsheets, ERP systems and other tools into a clean, structured foundation using Microsoft Fabric. This can include consolidating fragmented data sources, improving data quality and creating a more consistent way for information to be organised, governed and accessed across your business.
The result is a stronger base for AI, giving your teams and AI tools a single, reliable source of truth to work from. Consolidated, AI-ready data leads to smarter reporting, which in turn supports better-informed business decisions.
Your wine sector specialist – James Grant, Co-founder of iwantmore.ai
James Grant, Co-founder of iwantmore.ai
James has worked with businesses across the wine industry, including Mentzendorff and Hatch Mansfield, helping them find practical ways to use AI and automation across all areas of their business. James helps them work out where AI will make a difference, and then helps them make it happen.
WSET qualified AI consultant
He holds the WSET Level 3 Award in Wines and is now one exam away from finishing the WSET Diploma, where he won the Bibendum Prize for the wine business module. He also collects wine, with a focus on Champagne, Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Americas and speaks about AI to the trade at events such as the London Wine Fair.
That means he knows how the trade works before he starts talking about technology. He understands how agencies, importers and merchants buy, sell and move stock. He knows the pressure on margins and how much admin sits behind every allocation and every order. So when he looks for AI use cases in a wine business, he starts with the problems your team deals with every day.
Before he co-founded iwantmore.ai, James spent 16 years at RSM. He was a Partner, then UK CMO, and then Global Leader for Marketing and Business Development across more than 120 countries. He also sat on RSM’s global AI task force. Earlier in his career he was a British Army officer. You can find out more about iwantmore.ai’s leadership team here
Working together: what working with the iwantmore.ai team looks like
We begin with a discovery phase to understand where your business and people are today with AI.
We then map your processes, identify high-impact AI and automation use cases, and bring these to life through demonstrations of the art of the possible based on your own processes, working through this together to enable more informed decision-making on next steps.
From there, we either help you build out a full AI strategy or move straight to implementation to demonstrate value – with AI literacy always at the heart of what we do.
Want more AI? Let’s have a chat…
If you’d like to know more about our approach, or how we could help your wine business to integrate AI across your organisation, fill in your details below.
