Last week, The Drinks Business published a conversation worth every Virginia winery’s attention. Gino Colangelo — founder of Colangelo & Partners, one of the country’s most prominent wine PR agencies — sat down with the db podcast to mark his firm’s 20th anniversary, and he didn’t mince words: the American wine industry is falling behind because it has never built the kind of collective marketing infrastructure that other agricultural sectors take for granted.

Think about it. Dairy has one. Almonds have one. Even cranberries have one. Wine — an industry facing declining consumption, a crowded beverage landscape, and a generation of drinkers rethinking their relationship with alcohol — largely does not.

Colangelo knows this firsthand. For four years, he and wine writer Karen MacNeil have run Come Over October, a pro-bono national campaign celebrating wine’s role in bringing people together. It has become one of the largest grassroots wine campaigns in American history. And yet Colangelo describes industry support for it as inconsistent at best — arriving in fits and starts rather than as sustained investment.

His diagnosis of what works is just as instructive as his diagnosis of what’s broken. The regions and trade bodies gaining ground in the U.S. market — he cites Chianti Classico, Prosecco DOC, Chile, and Wines of Georgia — share one trait: they show up consistently, year after year, with steady incremental campaigns. The ones that fail are those that launch a big program and then go quiet. Market presence, in his words, is like driving an electric car: “You take your foot off the accelerator and it stops.”

Virginia Isn’t Waiting

Here’s the good news: Virginia doesn’t have to wonder what a collective answer looks like. We’ve already built one.

Toast Virginia is our statewide campaign built on the same insight Colangelo champions — that wine’s most powerful story isn’t scores or ceremony, but togetherness. From pizza night to milestone celebrations, the campaign positions Virginia wine as something to share, made by real people in real places across the Commonwealth.

And it exists precisely because the headwinds Colangelo describes are real here at home:

  • U.S. wine consumption by volume fell nearly 14% between 2019 and 2024, and younger consumers are drinking less often and more selectively.
  • Wine is competing for “share of glass” against RTDs, craft cocktails, and a growing wave of non-alcoholic options.
  • And the number that should motivate all of us: only 1 in 20 glasses of wine poured in Virginia comes from Virginia. Imagine if it were 1 in 10.

That last figure isn’t a lament — it’s an opportunity. Doubling Virginia wine’s share of its own home market would mean tens of millions of dollars in sales, tax revenue, and tourism value flowing to local farms, jobs, and small businesses. If every visitor to a Virginia winery bought just one more bottle per visit, that alone would represent over $25 million in new economic activity statewide.

The Lesson: Consistency Wins

Colangelo’s warning is really an invitation. Campaigns don’t fail because the message is wrong; they fail because the industry stops pushing. Toast Virginia was designed as a rallying cry with staying power — a shared message that any winery, restaurant, DMO, or tourism partner can pick up and carry, month after month, moment after moment.

The campaign assets are ready and waiting: photography, video, reels, and messaging guidelines built for wineries and destinations to deploy in their own channels. Every winery that posts, tags, and toasts adds momentum — and in collective marketing, momentum is everything.

Because when we toast Virginia, we invest in Virginia — in our farms, our families, and our future.

Get started: Explore the Toast Virginia campaign and download the assets at virginiawinecoalition.org/toastvirginia.

Source: Patrick Schmitt, “US wine industry risks losing ground without collective marketing,” The Drinks Business, 31 July 2026.