Best Practices for Your Winery's Photography

Anyone who works for your winery should be able to tell you the ideal situation in which a guest would be enjoying a glass of your wine. How does it taste? What are the conversations you’re having like? Who are you enjoying it with? Your job as a brand is to show your customers what this moment is like and capture beautiful imagery to convey them. 

When we are in the onboarding process for a new client, the topic of photography always comes up. Photography plays a pivotal role in getting your wine from your winery to your customer’s hand. The more a potential customer can envision themselves with your wine, the more likely they are to hit the buy button on your website. People won’t emotionally connect to a glass bottle, but they will connect to a photo of a group fo people having fun while enjoying a glass of your wine!  As someone who works for a winery, your job is to sell the wine. Our job is to help you market it! 

Read on for our top photography must-haves when planning your upcoming shoots. With these tips in mind, you’ll make the customer a part of your story (this is key!) and be on your way to selling more wine in no time.

Before the Shoot

Plan, conceptualize, and ensure everyone is in agreement on the vision for the shoot. While winging it may be tempting to “save time” trust us when we say this phase of photography is CRUCIAL!

• Create a Mood Board: This is a step that many people skip because they’re crunched for time. The thing is, by skipping this step, you’re creating more work for yourself in the long run. A mood board can be something as simple as a board on Pinterest including a collection of photos that align with your vision. The photos you include don’t have to be wine focused! Instead, look for photos that invoke the feelings and experiences you want to convey.

• Gather Necessary Props: To maximize your time shooting, we recommend gathering props beforehand. Flowers, food to style with your wine, linens, glassware: all of these things should be nicely organized and ready to go come shoot time.

• Brief Your Models on the Vibe You Want to Create: Whether you’re hiring professional models or enlisting friends and family members, it’s helpful to let them know the vibe you want to create. Is this a formal gathering or more laid back? Are you hoping to reflect the current season you’re in, or are you working ahead to capture photos for the upcoming season? Sharing details like these ahead of time will help your models know not only what to wear but how to carry themselves and interact with each other during the shoot as well.

During the Shoot

While all photoshoots are different in terms of focus, here is a list of key shots you should capture to cover the bases of all your marketing needs. Plan to refresh these photos at least twice per year, but ideally once per quarter.

• Horizontal Hero Shot of Your Vineyard: Oftentimes this shot is the first thing customers see when they land on your homepage. When shooting, make sure to think about the EMOTIONS you want to evoke through this photo just as much as the scenery. 

• Shots of Every Key Staff Member: These photos are more than just a headshot. Let your staff have fun -- dance around, engage with each other, hold a glass of wine in their hand. Again, these photos are inviting your potential customer into your story AND photos of staff consistently outperform any other photo on social media and in digital ads. Make sure you walk away from this shoot with plenty of options to use throughout the next 3-6 months. Consider asking everyone to bring two outfit choices so you can make the most of this time! 

• Here is a list of key staff members you should be sure to get photos of:

  • Owners

  • Tasting room manager

  • Vineyard manager

  • Winemaker

• Shots of Customers Exploring Experiences Offered: Whether it’s staged or your photographer comes during a peak visitation time at your vineyard, these photos should give the viewer wanderlust. Those views guests have while enjoying your tasting flight? Show them! The tasting room manager talking and laughing with your guests? Photograph that! All those special moments people note in reviews, get those on camera so you can entice even more people to visit your winery. You know it’s a special place, make sure your photos show that!

• Lifestyle Shots of Wine Being Enjoyed in a Home Setting: Not everyone can make it out to your winery, but they CAN all enjoy it in the comfort of their home. While this may seem obvious to you, it’s not always the first thing people think of, especially when you don’t have any lifestyle photography showing someone’s home environment. Utilize a guest house you have on your property or ask your photographer for studio suggestions that mimic a home environment. These are the types of photos that perform really well so taking the time to set the scene and capture them is worth the effort!

• Food and Wine Pairings: You know what photographs really well and invites the customer into the journey? FOOD! These don’t have to be advanced recipes with complex, hard to find ingredients. In fact, we recommend just the opposite. Choose to photograph food and wine pairings that the average person can find in their neighborhood grocery store. You want them to see your photo and think “Oh, hey I could make that!” The next logical thought from there is, “Now I need that wine to go along with it.” Just like that, you’ve enticed a potential customer to finally clear their shopping cart and complete the checkout process.

• Lifestyle Shots of Every Bottle of Wine: Bottle shots with a white background do not sell wine. Plain and simple! Lifestyle shots with your wine in a beautiful scene surrounded by fresh flowers, subtle cues to the tasting notes of your wine, and a freshly poured glass waiting for someone to drink it...now we’re talking! While the plain old white background shots have a time and a place, we much prefer the more stylized bottle shots for wine marketing.

• Photos of the Vines at Every Stage of the Growing Process: We know how hectic your job is, but bud break and harvest are pivotal moments in your wine’s growing process. And  beautiful ones at that! We encourage all our clients to take photos of their vines at every stage of the wine growing process, even the original planting and dormant stages. Having this progression of photos is a way to create a stunning visual experience on your website, in emails, or on social media.

After the Shoot

• Wine Color Guide: This guide can be a simple photo that you provide to your photographer that shows the colors you’d like each of your wine to be edited to! Providing this reference will allow the editing process to run smoothly for both you and your photographer.

• Preferred Photo Editing Style: Do you prefer light and bright or dark and moody? Do you want your photos to have more of a blue hue or yellow? If you’re unsure, send a few photos you love to your photographer and they can take it from there.

• Get to work on your marketing plan: Emails, website upgrades, social media, and digital ads are all great places to use your fresh new photos! If you’re one of our clients, simply send us a link to your new photo library and we’ll take it from there.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but hopefully this guide can serve as the jumping off point for your next photoshoot! As experts in DTC wine marketing, we’re here to help. Reach out to us for photography direction or hire one of our photographers to shoot for you! Our team has a range of photography styles that can meet your needs both off-site and on. 

You deserve photography that matches your brand’s vision! Book a shoot with us now.