The FlorVino
Marketing Plan

FlorVino does not have a persuasion problem. Nearly everyone who tastes the wine buys it. What it has is a doorway problem, and a proof problem.

The doorway problem is that 1.6 million people walk past that address every year and most of them never know what is inside. The proof problem is that flower wine sounds like a novelty until someone gives you a reason to take it seriously.

Both are solvable this quarter, and both answers already exist inside FlorVino. Four years of competition medals, and a 5.0 rating across 398 Google reviews. Neither is being used.

This surprised me, and it changed the whole plan. Before writing a single post I went looking for where people who walk into a place like FlorVino actually come from. It is not Instagram.

Social media matters. It is just not first, and building the plan as though it were would have put the effort in the wrong place.

The last number is the one that changed my thinking most. Reviews are usually the hard part, and FlorVino has already won that fight. The problem is that nobody outside Google can see it.

And there is a second problem underneath it. The Google listing still shows "Own this business?", which is what Google displays on a profile nobody has claimed. If that is right, FlorVino cannot reply to a single one of those 398 reviews, cannot control which searches it appears in, and cannot post to the listing. At roughly twenty new reviews a month, that is twenty guests a month who take the trouble to write something and hear nothing back. That is worth checking before anything else in this plan.

Every public review of FlorVino says the same three things in the same order. I had never heard of this. They gave me a taste. I bought bottles.

That is the whole business model, and it happened by accident. Someone standing outside offered a stranger a taste, and the stranger became a customer in fifteen minutes.

The plan below is mostly about making that happen on purpose, more often, and making sure the people it happens to leave a review and post a video afterwards.

Three posts a week. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. The days never move, so nobody has to decide anything. Two of the three are short video.

Every post is one of four things, and if an idea does not fit one of them it does not run.

Fifty one posts are already written out by date, each with the layout to use and one line of direction. Your designer builds eight templates once at the start, and after that every post is swapping a photo and a headline.

Small things, found while researching. None of them are hard and the first two are costing money right now.

• The phone number and email in the footer are wrong on every page. The number reads 2010 instead of 210, and the email is spelled florvine rather than florvino. Every page on the site is publishing a number nobody can call.
• The website and the printed price sheet give different discounts. The site says ten percent off a six pack, the printed sheet says twenty. One of them is wrong at the counter.
• The Jasmine page shows the Peaches tasting notes. It describes peach blossoms and a semi sweet palate under a wine the Wines page calls a dry white.
• The wine club has no published price or terms, so nobody can see what they are joining before they click. That is the channel that carries most of a winery's direct revenue.
• Galveston is closed, and four other websites have not been told. Your own event page correctly says bookings closed, but Viator still has a live Book Now button for a tour at 2127 The Strand with hours listed as Thursday to Sunday, noon to five. TripAdvisor still carries a Galveston tasting room listing, and Peek has a Galveston experience page. Someone can pay for a tour at a room that does not exist. That is a refund, a one star review and a chargeback, and it is the only item on this page that can cost you money today rather than slowly.
• The shop still spells Gloria as Glory. You settled this today. The product link reads /product/glory/ and the awards sheet says Glory, while the label on your own home page and the tasting form say Gloria. Both need changing so the medal card, the shelf talker and the shop agree.
• The Texas Wine Lover listing is unclaimed. Free, five minutes.

The two shows are the most distinctive thing FlorVino sells. They are the reason a visit is an evening rather than a fifteen minute pour. I checked the page today and it cannot be bought from.

• The calendar embedded on the shows page is empty. September is a bare grid. I checked it two ways, through the page itself and through the calendar feed behind it, and both come back with nothing scheduled between now and mid October.
• The winemaker dinner still reads "July 4th or by appointment." It is September first. That line has been stale for two months on the page that sells your highest ticket item.
• Neither show has a price, a length in the buy flow, or a booking button. The three buttons on that page all say Our Story and all go to the same page. There is no way to give you money for a show.
• The site says live music every Friday and Saturday night, and none of those nights appear on the calendar either. Google is currently carrying an event listing that your own site is not.

This is the cheapest fix in the whole plan. Twelve Friday and Saturday nights, two show times, and the dinner dates go onto the calendar once, and the page starts doing the job it was built for. Nothing else in this document beats putting dates on a page that already gets traffic.

I had Spirit Hills filed as a competitor. It is not. It is the same family, and that changes the strongest thing FlorVino has.

Here is what is public and checkable today. Hugo Bonjean runs Spirit Hills in Alberta, the CBC describes the family as coming from a long line of French winemakers, and their winery makes wine without grapes from dandelions and wild roses. Spirit Hills' own site puts the family's arrival in Alberta at 1997. Three of your six wines carry names that Spirit Hills has been selling for years: Dande, Wild Rosy and Yeehaa.

None of that is on the Our Story page. The page names the Bonjean family and calls it a nearly forgotten craft, and then gives no date, no place and no person. It says "years of blooms and batches" and "season after season." A reader finishes it knowing nothing they could repeat to a friend.

That is the proof problem, in one page. The medals answer "is this any good." The family answers "is this a gimmick," and it answers it harder than a medal does, because thirty years is not something a novelty brand can fake. It is also the difference between a press pitch that lands and one that does not. A new flower winery opening downtown is not a story. A family that has made wine without grapes for three decades, now pouring on Alamo Plaza, is one.

What I need is the real version from you. Where in France, how many generations, why Alberta, why Texas, and who first tried it with flowers. Twenty minutes of it, and it rewrites the Our Story page, the press pitch and half the September posts.

Easy to fix now, awkward later, and it is smaller than I first thought.

FlorVino should still not describe itself as the world's only flower winery, or the first. A winery in Oakland has made wine from hibiscus, rose and lavender since 2018, with coverage in Wine Enthusiast and the San Francisco Chronicle, and there are others in Los Angeles, Brooklyn and England. Spirit Hills is off that list now, but the rest of it still turns up in one search.

The home page currently opens with THE WORLD'S MOST UNIQUE WINERY. That is the line I would change. It invites a fact check and it says nothing. The lines already in the footer and on Our Story are stronger and all of them are true. Crafted from wildflowers, never grapes. A nearly forgotten craft, revived by the Bonjean family. Where we want scarcity, Texas' only flower winery holds up.

The sommelier quote is a smaller problem than I flagged before. An earlier version of that page had the Eric Beaumard line praising Spirit Hills by name. Since that is the same family, the honest fix is a wording change rather than pulling it: praise for the family's flower wine, not for a specific bottle it may not have been about. Worth settling before it goes on a poster.

Five numbers, once a month, no dashboard.

• Google reviews. It sits at 398 today and runs at about twenty a month. The QR code already does this, so the job is holding the 5.0, not chasing volume.
• Sends on video posts. Whether people are forwarding it to a friend, which is what Instagram rewards.
• Saves on the wine carousels.
• Reach and followers, both platforms, against the month before.
• How many people at the bar say they saw us before they came in. Crude, and the most honest number in the list.

One target beyond that: at least one real press feature by December 31.

Worth saying plainly: there is no baseline yet. Nobody has recorded FlorVino's reach or follower numbers, so the first thing I do is capture where we are starting from. Otherwise none of the above means anything in January.

Thanks for the five answers. Most of the plan is unblocked now. Here is exactly what is locked in, what is still needed from you, and what happens next.

Two things still open

Galveston delisting, you said go

You approved chasing this down. Three sites are confirmed with a live, bookable Galveston listing.

These three are third-party listing platforms, so closing them almost always needs your own account login on each. If you can send access, or forward whatever confirmation email you got when each was first listed, HazelPiper will draft the takedown request for each one.

Still on the original list

• One hour on the six wines. Which flower, where it comes from, one surprising thing about how you handle it, what you would say about it at the bar.
• One filming session. Three short clips of guests tasting for the first time, one good photograph of each flower.
• Which discount is correct, website or the printed price sheet. Still an open conflict, separate from the six pack number above.