Rob McMillan, executive vp and founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division, couldn’t be more direct: If he doesn’t get more responses to the SVB Wine Industry Survey, this will be its last year.
In the past, he would get more than 1,000 responses. This year, thus far, he has fewer than 400 responses.
Why the low response rate? Maybe the electrical outages caused by PG&E. Maybe the timing is bad, coming during the winegrape harvest (but it has to be done at this time for results be available in January, to be useful for winery planning for the future. Or maybe the survey has just outlived its usefulness and isn’t worth the time and expense involved in producing it as a free service.
You can read McMillan’s comments here, and take the survey here.
“If we get a faint response in the final days, this will be the last year for the survey. If we get a significant pickup in responses – we will take that as evidence there is still demand and will continue on,” McMillan says.