The Most Undervalued Marketing Play in the Beverage Industry Right Now
Let us be honest about where the industry is.
The numbers are not pretty. Total market volume is declining. Consolidation at the distributor level is reshaping access to the market. Consumer habits are shifting in ways that have not yet fully settled. Walk into any industry gathering, and the conversation is the same: things are tighter, slower, and stranger than they were three years ago.
That is exactly why what you do with your future marketing dollars matters more than it ever has.
Here is the problem. The traditional playbook is not built for this moment. PR firms charge $100,000 or more to represent a single brand for a single year. What does that buy you? A few press placements, some outreach to journalists who may or may not cover you, and a retainer that keeps going regardless of results. For a small or mid-size producer, that is not a marketing strategy. That is a bet.
Then there are influencers. A single Instagram reel from a creator with a meaningful following runs anywhere from $300 to several thousand dollars. Per post. Per bottle. And the content disappears in 72 hours. A mid-campaign creator package can run $10,000 to $30,000 for a handful of posts and no guaranteed reach.
And trade shows. A booth at a major industry event costs thousands before you add team travel, sample allocation, and the hours spent standing on a concrete floor hoping the right buyer walks past. The shelf life of that investment is the weekend of the show. Then it is gone.
TERROIR is a different calculation entirely.
We built TERROIR out of seven intriguing categories that we feel based on the data, current attitudes, and future outlook will lead the growth into 2027: Touriga Nacional and Portuguese varietals, Emerging spirits, Riesling, Rum, Obscure, Italian varietals, and Rye.
Why these categories?
Each one was carefully chosen after much debate, research, reading, and listening to what the industry is saying. Our expertise led us to design this campaign to showcase the wines, spirits and alt-beverages to help realign the industry.
T — Touriga — Portuguese Varietals
Portugal produces some of the world’s most distinctive wines from indigenous varieties found nowhere else on earth. Touriga Nacional — the backbone of Port and increasingly the star of dry Douro reds — delivers extraordinary depth, violet aromatics, and aging potential that rivals the finest Cabernets or Nebbiolos at a fraction of the price. Alentejo, Dão, and Bairrada add further intrigue with their own indigenous grapes and terroir-driven styles.
The US market for Portuguese wines grew significantly in the 2020s, fueled by sommelier curiosity and the rise of natural/minimal-intervention wine culture. TERROIR captures this momentum by building bartender and sommelier champions from scratch — people who will pour, recommend, and talk about these wines for years.
E — Emerging Spirits
‘Emerging’ in the TERROIR campaign is deliberately broad by design. It captures the entire frontier of beverage culture — everything that doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional wine or spirits category but represents the future of the back bar and the wine list. This includes: Mezcal and rare agave spirits (Sotol, Raicilla, Bacanora), Sake produced in the United States, Cachaça, Pisco, Soju, Baijiu, Arrack, Clairin, and the rapidly growing category of functional/adaptogenic non-alcoholic spirits and alternatives.
The Emerging category is where the most culturally curious bartenders and sommeliers live. These are the industry’s early adopters — the people who championed mezcal before it was mainstream, who put sake on their bar carts, who are now exploring the rice wines and sugarcane spirits of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. TERROIR gives these producers a stage.
R — Riesling
Riesling is arguably the most misunderstood grape on earth — and the most exciting when properly understood. For too long, ‘Riesling’ in the American market meant ‘sweet,’ a reputation built on the mass-market styles that flooded shelves in the 1980s and ’90s. That era is over. Today’s Riesling story is about Grosses Gewächs (GG) — Germany’s elite dry Riesling classification — and about the extraordinary diversity of styles from Mosel, Rheingau, Alsace, Clare Valley, and the Finger Lakes.
Bartenders have begun to rediscover Riesling as the ultimate cocktail-adjacent wine: its bright acidity, pure fruit expression, and low alcohol make it the perfect pairing partner and increasingly a base for low-ABV cocktail builds. The TERROIR campaign capitalizes on this trajectory by putting world-class Riesling producers directly in front of the people who build wine lists and cocktail menus.
R — Rum
Rum is in the middle of its most significant cultural moment in decades. The category — long dominated by mass-market mixers and spring break connotations — has undergone a complete renaissance driven by craft distillers, single-estate agricole producers, and a new generation of bartenders who treat Rum with the same seriousness they once reserved for Bourbon and Scotch. The result is a category of extraordinary depth: from Hampden Estate’s high-ester funk to Foursquare’s single-blended artistry to Martinique’s AOC-regulated rhum agricole to American Craft Rum from Boston to Louisiana to Hawaii.
TERROIR captures Rum at its greatest inflection point. Producers who enter this campaign gain access to the exact audience — adventurous, education-hungry, cocktail-forward bartenders — most likely to champion their products on menus and in guest conversations.
O — Obscure
Obscure champions lesser‑known grapes, regions, and beverage categories, giving them the cultural and commercial oxygen they rarely receive. For bartenders and sommeliers, the value is immediate: these professionals are constantly searching for new levers of differentiation, new stories to tell, and new flavors that set their programs apart. Obscure gives them a structured platform to explore underrepresented varieties, from grapes like Teroldego and Fernao Pires to categories like Madeira or Rakija, and to translate that exploration into compelling menus and guest education. In a market saturated with the same dozen grapes and the same predictable spirits, the campaign restores a sense of discovery—something beverage professionals crave because it strengthens their authority, deepens their craft, and keeps their guests engaged.
For consumers, Obscure fills an equally important gap. Most drinkers want to explore but lack the context, confidence, or exposure to move beyond familiar labels. By spotlighting lesser‑known regions and categories in an accessible, story‑driven way, the campaign lowers the barrier to entry and reframes exploration as an invitation rather than a risk. It empowers drinkers to understand why these wines and spirits matter—culturally, historically, and sensorially—and why they often deliver exceptional value. In doing so, Obscure strengthens the entire ecosystem: bartenders and sommeliers gain new tools for creativity, producers gain visibility, and consumers gain a richer, more adventurous drinking life.
I — Italian Varietals
Italy produces wine from more indigenous grape varieties than any other country on earth — over 350 authorized varieties and counting. Yet the American market is dominated by a handful of familiar names: Chianti, Pinot Grigio, Barolo. TERROIR’s Italian Varietals category is about everything beyond the obvious — about Nerello Mascalese on Etna’s volcanic slopes, about Fiano and Greco in Campania, about Amarone producers challenging the world’s top reds at every price tier, about Ribolla Gialla and the radical orange wine revolution in Friuli.
Italian wines are the backbone of American wine culture — but there’s a generation of sommeliers now pushing past the familiar names into indigenous variety exploration. BevFluence’s TERROIR campaign meets them there, bringing the producers who make those discoveries possible into direct conversation with the industry professionals who matter most.
R — Rye
Rye whiskey is the cocktail industry’s original spirit — the base of the Manhattan, the Sazerac, the Ward 8, and countless other classics that defined American bar culture before Prohibition. After decades of dominance by Bourbon, Rye has reclaimed its place at the forefront of American whiskey culture, driven by both heritage brands rediscovering their roots and a wave of craft distillers committed to rye’s distinctive peppery, spicy, grain-forward character.
Today’s Rye landscape is extraordinarily diverse: from the 95%-rye high-rectified Indiana-sourced products that built modern cocktail bars to the single-estate heritage Monongahela style of Pennsylvania, from many producer’s farm-to-bottle programs to Canada’s underappreciated century-old Rye traditions (Lot 40, Alberta Premium). TERROIR captures this full spectrum — and gives Rye producers a platform to educate the bartenders who are their most powerful ambassadors.
What happens to your submissions?
BevFluence® ensures that your submission is evaluated multiple times.
We’ve watched too many bottles, cans, and drams get shipped off to conferences, campaigns, and media — used once, then forgotten. Years in this industry taught us that waste like that isn’t just a hit to your marketing budget. It’s a disregard for what actually went into that liquid.
That’s why we built a program that puts every sample to work multiple times over — squeezing real value out of every pour, every can, every dram. We know what it takes to produce that juice. We know how hard it is to part with it. So, we made sure none of it goes to waste.
TERROIR incorporates both a virtual marketing campaign plus multiple in-person industry events we call Speakeasies.
In the marketing campaign, every submission is activated across our network of skilled creators who produce authentic, high‑quality content. Posts, reels, stories, long-form reviews, and educational pieces. Analytics from previous campaigns show that the posts reach 3 million-plus engaged followers in the beverage community. Buyers, bartenders, enthusiasts, and decision-makers who care about what they drink and who makes it. BevFluence® will inform you where to send your submissions and you just sit back and engage with all the content from your new brand advocates.
Your submission will also be showcased during all 2027 BevFluence® Speakeasies. These are intimate gatherings of curated attendees. We spend three days providing education, production access, curated tastings, mentorship, creative time, memories, and of course tons of authentic content.
Each Speakeasy starts with a blind panel review of all submissions. The individual evaluation notes are saved in the BevFluence® Collaborations platform and are available for brands to review. Reviews are also published in the BevFluence® 2027 Holiday Beverage Guide. But the blind tasting is, perhaps, the least interesting part.
Every submission goes through BevFluence® Discovery Labs, where our attendees get hands on creating blends, pairings, cocktails, menu strategies and more. If we haven’t explained it well enough yet, every bottle, can, dram and drop gets used many times, as we create tasting notes, funky pairings, holiday reviews, videos, hero shots, and more. Beyond any reasonable expectation we use every submission many times.
The Early Bird submission fee is $435. Six or more entries drops every single submission to $325. Standard pricing opens February 1, 2027 at $600. Early activation is highly recommended. Submissions received before October 31, 2026 will benefit from two cycles of Holiday content – Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and more for 2026 & 2027.
For context: $435 is far less than a single post from a micro-influencer with 50,000 followers. It is a fraction of a trade show booth deposit. It is a rounding error on a PR firm retainer.
What you get in return is the largest concentration of content creation, blind reviews, editorial coverage, industry activation, and live event exposure that any beverage brand can access in a single submission. As some experts have claimed, our programming is a “Magical Combination” that exists nowhere else.
If you decide to skip this campaign, what is your plan?
TERROIR is where that work gets done.
Registration is open now through October 31, 2027. Early Bird pricing closes January 31, 2027.
Register at BevFluence Collaborations.
PDF Media Kit for TERRIOR Campaign.
