For years, wineries have been told to invest in direct customer relationships. Build the club. Improve the tasting room. Grow the list. Deepen the connection.
But the way many employers staff these areas has not fully caught up.
That is one of the more practical hiring issues facing wine businesses right now. The industry is asking more from DTC, but often without rethinking the roles responsible for making it work.
A tasting room employee is expected to create a memorable guest experience, represent the brand with polish, and turn a visit into an ongoing customer relationship. A wine club or customer service employee may be responsible for retention, shipping issues, member communication, event support, database accuracy, and recurring revenue. These are not minor responsibilities.
Yet too often, these positions are still treated as basic hospitality or administrative jobs.
That gap matters more in a slower market. With softer visitation, more cautious customers, and pressure on traditional sales channels, wineries have less room for missed opportunities in the customer relationship. The issue is not that every tasting room associate needs a senior title - the issue is that employers need to be honest about what these roles actually do for the business.
If a position is responsible for revenue, retention, customer experience, or brand loyalty, it should be designed that way. That means more thoughtful hiring, better training, clearer expectations, and a compensation structure that reflects the value of the work.
It also means looking for different qualities in candidates.
Wine knowledge is useful, but it is not the whole job. The strongest DTC employees often bring skills from restaurants, hotels, retail, events, luxury service, membership programs, or e-commerce. They know how to recover a guest experience, manage details under pressure, communicate clearly, and build trust quickly.
Those skills are not “soft.” They are commercial skills.
For wineries, the opportunity is to stop thinking about customer-facing roles as interchangeable labor. A good hospitality employee can influence club growth. A strong club manager can protect recurring revenue. A detail-oriented customer service person can prevent cancellations. A well-trained events or tasting room team can turn a one-time visitor into a long-term buyer. That kind of work deserves more structure than a quick onboarding, a tasting sheet, and a reminder to mention the club.
Employers do not need to overcomplicate this. They can start by asking a few direct questions before hiring:
- Is this role mainly about service, sales, retention, operations, or some combination of those?
- What business outcome should this person influence?
- What skills are required on day one, and what can be trained?
- How will the employee know whether they are succeeding?
- Does the pay match the responsibility being placed on the role?
Those questions are especially important for small and mid-sized wineries, where one person may have an outsized impact on the customer experience. In a lean team, a vaguely defined role can create frustration quickly. A well-designed role can make the business more resilient.
The wine industry does not need to professionalize itself into something cold or corporate. Hospitality still needs warmth. Wine still needs story. Guests still want a sense of place and personality. But businesses cannot depend on direct relationships while underinvesting in the people responsible for maintaining them.
If DTC is central to the future of wine, then DTC talent has to be treated as central too. That may be one of the simplest hiring shifts employers can make right now: stop filling customer-facing positions as if they are support roles, and start building them as revenue, retention, and relationship roles.
In the current market, that distinction matters.