A Finger Lakes winery marketing calendar, season by season

Why most winery marketing calendars fail

The most common pattern: marketing happens reactively. A slow Tuesday in March produces a last-minute email. A friend mentions that a competitor ran a good Mother’s Day promotion. Someone realizes in mid-September that harvest season is already happening and no one has sent anything about it.

The result is a communications schedule that looks random to customers because it is random — driven by staff availability and momentary anxiety rather than by a deliberate view of the year. Customers who joined the wine club in August and heard from you three times in the fall go quiet by February not because they lost interest, but because you stopped showing up.

A calendar doesn’t require a large marketing operation. It requires about two hours in January and thirty minutes of review each month. The leverage is in the planning, not the execution.

January – February: off-season, on-purpose

This is the slowest period for tasting room traffic, which makes it the best time for the work that doesn’t get done during the busy season: reviewing what worked last year, setting the promotional calendar for the next twelve months, cleaning the email list, and building any assets (updated wine descriptions, photography, website copy) that need to exist before the season opens.

For wine club members, January is a good time for a “here’s what’s coming this year” email — new releases planned, events on the calendar, any changes to how the club works. It treats members as insiders, which is part of what they’re paying for. Open rates on this kind of email are typically among the highest of the year.

January is also when wine club renewals deserve attention. If your club is subscription-based, the months when members are least engaged are the months they are most likely to quietly lapse. A personal-feeling note from the winery in January — not a form email, or something that reads like one — is worth more than any promotional email you will send in July.

March – April: the warm-up

Traffic starts returning in late March and accelerates through April, particularly on weekends. The Finger Lakes Wine Trail spring events (Riesling Camp and similar) bring regional visitors who are specifically coming to taste. These visitors are more likely to join a wine club, buy by the case, and return than a random summer tourist.

Marketing priorities for spring: announce the season opening if you close in winter, communicate what’s new (new releases, new tasting experiences, new staff), and make sure your wine club acquisition materials are current and not embarrassing. A visitor who drives three hours for a wine trail weekend should not encounter a wine club sign-up sheet with last year’s pricing.

This is also the right time to run any paid media you intend to run for the season — search campaigns, regional publication placements — so the targeting is tuned before peak traffic arrives.

May – June: the opening of the season

Memorial Day weekend is the effective opening of the Finger Lakes visitor season. Traffic jumps. Walk-ins increase. The ratio of first-time visitors goes up. This is the period when tasting room staff have the most opportunities to convert new visitors into wine club members, and when the email ask mechanic matters most.

Mother’s Day (early May) and Father’s Day (mid-June) are legitimate promotional moments for wineries — genuinely high gifting periods where a well-timed email to your existing list is both appropriate and useful. Neither requires a discount. “We’re a good gift and here’s how to give one” is enough of a message.

One thing to avoid in this period: over-communicating to your email list. If you send four emails in May, you will train your best subscribers to stop opening them by August. Two emails in May — one for Mother’s Day, one for season-opening news — is the right ceiling for most wineries.

July – August: peak season

Summer is when the most people visit, and when the least amount of proactive marketing is necessary. Traffic is self-generating. The work is almost entirely operational: making sure the tasting room experience is good enough to convert visitors, capturing email addresses effectively, and not letting wine club follow-up slip because everyone is busy.

The marketing calendar for summer should be light. One email per month to the list, focused on what’s happening at the winery (an upcoming event, a wine that’s selling out, a note about harvest). No heroics required. The biggest mistake wineries make in July and August is either going silent entirely or overcorrecting and sending weekly promotions, both of which damage the list in different ways.

If you run events — concerts, dinners, club member nights — summer is the season where they pay off the most. A mid-August club member event, communicated in early July, gives members something to look forward to and reinforces the value of membership at the moment when casual visitors are most visibly enjoying the winery.

September – October: harvest, the second peak

Harvest season is the most photographed, most shared, and most emotionally resonant time at a Finger Lakes winery. The vines are at their most dramatic. The work of the year is visibly coming together. Visitors who come in October have often been planning the trip since summer.

This is the best window for content marketing — harvest updates, behind-the-scenes notes, the story of a particular vintage as it’s happening. Social media, email, and a short journal post all work here. The content writes itself if someone is paying attention and willing to write it down.

Harvest is also when wine club shipments need to be timed carefully. A fall shipment that arrives in late October — when members have harvest on their minds and may have just visited — performs better than one that arrives in early September when the season still feels ongoing. The sequencing matters more than most wineries realize.

November – December: the holiday buying season

December is the second-highest revenue month for most Finger Lakes wineries, driven almost entirely by gift purchases. The visitors are fewer but the average transaction value is higher. The email list earns its keep here: a subscriber who joined in August and has heard from you three times since then is a meaningfully warmer lead for a holiday gift purchase than someone finding you through a search ad for the first time in December.

The holiday promotional calendar should be planned by late October. Key moments: a Thanksgiving email (wine pairings, an honest note about the year), a Black Friday / Cyber Monday promotion if you run one (not required, and some wineries rightly choose not to participate in discount culture), a “last shipping date” email in mid-December, and a thank-you note in late December that doesn’t ask for anything.

That last email — the one that doesn’t ask for anything — is consistently underused. It is also one of the highest-performing emails of the year in terms of reply rate and the kind of goodwill that carries over into January renewals.

Putting the calendar together

The practical version of this is a shared document listing each month, the one or two emails going out, any events happening, and the wine club action (shipment, renewal push, member event). Build it in January. Review it at the start of each month. Update it when something changes. That is the whole system.

What it is not: a detailed content plan with copy written months in advance, a social media schedule, or a project management tool. The calendar handles the timing problem. The content problem gets solved closer to when the content goes out, when you actually know what’s happening at the winery.