The Contact Ladder: how often should you really contact a wine importer?

There is a version of this business that runs on volume. Buy a list of 2,000 importers, blast it monthly, measure opens, repeat. It works, briefly, for whoever does it first in a market. Then the inbox closes and it never opens again.

We work the other way, and after six years across China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Australia and Africa, we can describe the method precisely. We call it the contact ladder. Every rung has a job, and the mistake most exporters make is using one rung for everything.

Cold email: three or four times a year. Not more.

Cold email works. It opens doors that nothing else opens at that cost. But it is a low-yield channel by nature, and its yield collapses the moment you overuse it. Our rule is three to four cold approaches per importer per year, maximum. Not because we lack the tooling to send more, but because we intend to still be welcome in that inbox in five years. An importer who deletes your name on sight is a market you have closed for yourself.

Cold calls: a precision instrument, not a volume one.

We do not cold call to introduce ourselves. We call when an answer is genuinely expected and not arriving: an offer sent two weeks ago, samples that landed but drew no feedback, a discussion that stalled mid-negotiation. In that setting a call is welcome, because it moves something the buyer already has on their desk. Used as a first touch, it is an interruption; used as an unblocker, it is a service.

Email: the official record.

Every meeting, offer, contract and order gets an email recap. This is where the formal relationship lives: prices, terms, what was agreed, what happens next. Chat apps are wonderful and remember nothing you can rely on six months later. If it matters commercially, it exists in an email.

WeChat, WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, LINE: the glue.

This is the layer most Western exporters underestimate, and in Asia it decides everything. It carries the follow-up, the article you thought they would like, the “are you at Vinexpo?”, the photo of their wine on a shelf in Shenzhen. It is where relationships actually live between formal moments. When we recruited the room for our Shenzhen tasting in July, over 200 South China trade contacts were approached across trade lists, WeChat, LinkedIn and direct calls, three to four touches each. 43 signed up. Around 28 came. That funnel does not exist without the chat layer.

Meetings: where it becomes real.

In 18 months our team logged more than 300 meetings with importers across our markets. Nothing in the ladder below this rung converts at the same rate. An email asks for attention; a meeting has it. A buyer will tell you across a table what they would never write down: the price ceiling, the gap in their portfolio, the brand they are about to drop.

Tastings: the top rung, once a year per market.

High cost, high preparation, high return. For our Seoul trade tasting in July, 306 importers were contacted in the run-up, 24 buyers from 18 companies came into the room, and every one of them heard back within 48 hours. A tasting compresses a year of relationship-building into an afternoon, because the wine does the arguing. We run one per market per year, and we plan it like a campaign, not an event.

Fairs: the widest net we have.

Fairs remain one of our most useful tools and we take booths at many of them across the region. Nothing else puts you in front of that many new importers in three days, and nothing else lets your existing partners find you without an appointment. The honest caveat is that quality varies enormously from fair to fair, and in some markets footfall is thinning while costs are not. So we choose them deliberately rather than by habit, we prepare the meeting book before we arrive, and we complement them with formats that buy depth instead of volume. In Australia this June that meant a private suite alongside the fair circuit: fourteen importer meetings, forty-five minutes to two hours each.

The principle underneath all of it

Face beats email, every time. Meeting plus tasting beats meeting, every time. And the whole point of the lower rungs is to earn the higher ones.

Which is why restraint is not politeness, it is strategy. Every channel has a budget: your time, your travel, your money, and the buyer’s patience. Spend the buyer’s patience on 12 cold emails a year and you will not get the meeting that was worth 200 of them.

Producers often ask us how long this takes. Measured across our own signed mandates, the first confirmed order arrives between two and ten months after signing, most often around seven to ten. That is what climbing the ladder properly looks like.

Your Wine Rep represents wineries and distilleries across Asia-Pacific and Africa, from first importer contact to reorder. Get in touch to discuss your market.

Further reading: What a wine fair really costs · How long to a first order in Asia · FAQ: wine export to Asia · Talk to us about your market