Winemakers On Fire

Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa!

I've been writing LinkedIn mini posts three times a week for several months now—short, sharp observations about wine, positioning, and what it means to build something worth remembering in an era when AI can replicate almost everything except the irreducibly human.

And I noticed a pattern in the ones that landed hardest.

They weren't about tactics. They weren't about technology. They were about what you stand for—and whether you're willing to say it out loud.

The six posts in this issue circle the same idea from different angles. Story isn't the decoration you add after the strategy is set. It's the foundation the strategy is built on. And a point of view isn't a marketing choice—it's a positioning decision. The most important one you'll ever make.

Together, these six posts make a single argument: what you say and how consistently you say it are what you are in the marketplace. Not what you produce. Not what you charge. Not what the critic scored you.

What you stand for.

That argument is also at the heart of my forthcoming book, Own Position Zero: The Human Advantage No Algorithm Can Fake—which these posts have been quietly building towards.

Read them in sequence if you can. The arc matters.

Story is not marketing. Story is strategy.

Decoration or Foundation

Most businesses treat story as decoration.

Something you add after the real decisions are made. After the product is built. After the label is designed. After the strategy is set.

That's backwards.

The businesses worth studying didn't find a story to wrap around their strategy.

They built their strategy around a story that was already true.

Story Came First

Sadie didn't build Sadie Family Wines and then find a story.

Truth over perceived perfection. Loyalty over urgency. Quality over volume.

The story came first. The wine was built to express it.

Most businesses wait until the product is right before figuring out what it means.

The product will never be right enough to do that work alone.

The Only Moat

Your story is the one thing AI cannot generate.

Not a version of it. Not a paraphrase. Not a simulation.

The specific combination of decisions, failures, convictions, and experience that brought you here—that combination belongs to nobody else.

That's not a narrative asset.

That's your only defensible moat.

A point of view.

Missing Position

Most wine businesses don't have a point of view.

They have preferences. Opinions. Aesthetic sensibilities. Things they believe privately and avoid publicly.

A point of view is different.

It's what you'd say if you knew half your audience would disagree—and you said it anyway.

Most businesses never get there. The ones that do become impossible to ignore.

Opinion or Position

An opinion changes with the room.

A position holds regardless of who's in it.

Most businesses confuse the two. They say what the room wants to hear and call it their point of view. Then they wonder why nobody remembers them.

The wine industry is full of opinions.

It is dangerously short of positions.

Say the Thing

The point of view you're most afraid to state publicly is almost certainly the one most worth stating.

Not because provocation is valuable. Because clarity is.

The businesses worth following didn't find a safer way to say what they believed.

They said it. Consistently. Until the right people found them.

That's not marketing. That's a position.

Wine Futurist Mike Carter, based in Cape Town, South Africa, believes the path to future success isn't found in perfect predictions but in perfect positioning. Connect on LinkedIn for more contrarian thinking about wine's future.

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