Wisdom From The Women Leading the Wine & Spirits Industries, with Alexandra Savona Of Summer Water

An interview with Kelly Reeves

Give your product away. Liquid on lips is one of, if not the most, successful conversion drivers. Traditional sampling events are a standard industry practice, but not enough brands think about or feel comfortable giving product away at large in more creative ways. Every opportunity to sponsor a charitable event, show up in a store, even give a product to a friend is a chance to gain a new consumer, who will likely share your product with others through word of mouth. Product samples can feel like an expensive or immeasurable lever, but it’s one I firmly believe in and has been the backbone of many successful brand strategies within and across alcohol categories. You’ll see Summer Water samplings and sponsorships everywhere you go nationally this year!

Less than 20% of winemakers and distillers are women. Traditionally, women were excluded from these industries. This number is slowly rising as more women choose to study this profession and enter the wine and spirits fields. What is it like for those women who work in this male-dominated industry? What are some of the challenges that these women face? Is there hope for better representation, and better wages, for women in the wine and spirits industry? As a part of our series about women leading the wine and spirits industries, we had the pleasure of interviewing Alexandra Savona.

Alexandra Savona is the CEO of Summer Water Rosé, one of the top selling and top-rated domestic rosés in the US. Prior to Summer Water, Alexandra served as Corona Extra’s Global Strategy Director at Anheuser-Busch InBev, one of the fastest growing and most iconic beer brands in the world, where she led consumer insights, marketing, performance, and double-digit business growth across international markets. Now, Alexandra is poised to lead the next era of Summer Water — beginning with this spring’s release of the highly-anticipated 2023 Rosé.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your origin story, and your childhood?

I’m a born and raised New Yorker, so business has always been hardwired into my brain. Since childhood, I was always coming up with ways to create things and share them with others, starting with selling rings out of a basket at local flea markets as a 4-year-old to running weekly lemonade stands for charity as a 9-year-old on West 79th Street. Eventually at age 14, I started a clip-on earring company for girls like myself who weren’t allowed to pierce their ears and sold my one-of-a-kind creations into a few uptown boutiques before graduating into more adult jewelry sales throughout high school and college. My college application essay was actually about a morning I played hooky from school to attend Bendel’s Open Call Day on 5th Avenue and pitch their jewelry buyers my line. I didn’t get the placement, but I got a good story!

Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to the wine and spirits industry?

As an only child, I’ve always been really proactive in forging connections with others and bringing people together. So when I was at business school and found ABInBev — specifically their disruptive innovation and VC arm, ZX Ventures — I discovered that the alcohol industry would allow me to do that professionally. I learned so much starting my career in beer, and now am thrilled to expand my perspective into wine and specifically rosé where I represent our target consumer. Consumer insight has always been the backbone of everything I have done as a marketer, entrepreneur, and strategist, so it’s a privilege to build a brand for women like myself in an industry where the strategy has historically been set by men. According to McKinsey, only 4% of the C-suite in wine & spirits is female. With insight comes innovation, so to lead Summer Water — which has turned traditional rosé-making on its head thanks to our winemaker and his commitment to sourcing the best grapes specifically for rosé rather than using undesirable red wine grapes — was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up!

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Within a month of starting as CEO of Summer Water, I had to host an event for one of our top distributor partners. As usual, the attendees were almost exclusively male. As we were packing up at the end of the day, one of the few female attendees approached me and said, “I just want to let you know, all of us were talking about how inspiring it is to see you as a CEO.” Honestly, it was one of my favorite moments in my career. It taught me 1) never take for granted or lose sight of the fact that you are one of the only women in the room, and 2) always always always let the other women in the room know you’re behind them. That woman probably doesn’t know the impact her small comment made on me, but it’s microgestures like these that help motivate other women for the collective good. I’ll be doing it every chance I get!

It has been said that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

At my first job, the company took us on a ski trip. I had never skied before, so they were kind enough to sign me up for lessons. I was antsy to get on the slopes and re-join my coworkers, so I cut out of the class about an hour in and challenged myself on a green slope. Big mistake. I quickly flipped out and had a tear-filled panic attack. Took my skis off and walked down the entire mountain. I didn’t ski the rest of the weekend, I was so traumatized. Lesson learned: don’t cut class.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Absolutely my mother. She has always supported my various business venture ideas since I was a child. She would travel with me into the depths of jewelry findings stores on 46th Street, stay up late on a Friday night to build sell sheets, and encourage me to learn sales and approach businesses in my neighborhood as just a teenager (and wait around the corner, of course). She fostered an entrepreneurial spirit in me without which I wouldn’t be where I am today.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

• Collaboration: As I mentioned before, bringing people together has always been a large piece of my identity and is what brought me into the alcohol category in 2017 when I first interned at ZX Ventures during Business School (where I also happened to be social chair). It’s a trait that has allowed me to professionally build relationships and collaborate with my teams effectively, but also has fed a fundamental need to connect with and learn from consumers directly. I’m a huge believer in qualitative research done firsthand, so I am always talking to people to understand how we can do better as a brand.
• Open-mindedness: A big part of being collaborative is being a good listener with a willingness to change your mind based on what you learn. I think this is the most important trait for a leader to have.
• Running toward problems & a bias to action: I don’t procrastinate, never have, and always finished my assignments days in advance because I didn’t want them hanging over my head. Professionally now I always prioritize the thing that is the most urgent and critical threat to my business.

Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

This is going to sound really simple, but the most exciting initiative at Summer Water right now is starting to tell our quality story. The brand has never before marketed that it is consistently rated 90+ points year over year for 4 years by Wine Enthusiast. 91 this year! And this isn’t an easy feat. Most rosé wines are made with the leftover grapes that winemakers don’t want to use for red wine. In other words, lower quality grapes or I like to call them “red wine rejects”, which means they have to add a bunch of stuff to the wine to make it taste good. But Summer Water and our winemaker Ryan Zotovich are rosé obsessed and focused on finding the best possible grapes to make the best possible rosé. Which means you can have a very light hand in the winemaking process, without adding sugar — you just let the grapes speak for themselves. So communicating these amazing ratings and celebrating our clean approach to winemaking is our key focus this year, and I believe will have a great impact on our consumers who want and deserve the best possible wine at an amazing value. In an overwhelming category with an absurd amount of choice, we can make this one easy for her. She deserves the best and we’re going to give it to her.

Ok. Thank you for all that. Let’s now jump to the main core of our interview. Despite great progress that has been made we still have a lot more work to do to achieve gender parity in this industry. In Napa Valley, the percentage of lead women winemakers or winery owners is about 12%. Overall, men account for about 80% of winemakers and winery owners. In your opinion or experience, what 3 things can be done by a)individuals b)companies and/or c) society as a whole to support greater gender parity moving forward?

Supporting and purchasing women-led brands is the easiest thing that everyone can do and it unsurprisingly has an amazing waterfall effect. The more successful women’s businesses are, the more proof there is to increase investment in women-led businesses, which is pitifully low. The more successful women’s businesses are, the more women will be hired into the industry. The more women in the industry there are, the more insightful wine & spirits brands will be to women’s needs, making these brands even more successful. It’s truly a virtuous cycle that can be unlocked with that single, simple action of buying from female-led brands.

You are a “Wine and Spirits Insider”. If you had to advise someone about 5 non-intuitive things one should know to succeed in the wine and spirits industry, what would you say? Can you please give a story or an example for each?

• Give your product away. Liquid on lips is one of, if not the most, successful conversion drivers. Traditional sampling events are a standard industry practice, but not enough brands think about or feel comfortable giving product away at large in more creative ways. Every opportunity to sponsor a charitable event, show up in a store, even give a product to a friend is a chance to gain a new consumer, who will likely share your product with others through word of mouth. Product samples can feel like an expensive or immeasurable lever, but it’s one I firmly believe in and has been the backbone of many successful brand strategies within and across alcohol categories. You’ll see Summer Water samplings and sponsorships everywhere you go nationally this year!
• Traditional marketing first, sexy marketing second. It’s easy to get caught up in the latest viral trends and chase shiny objects, particularly in a category like ours that is synonymous with fun and creativity. But I find that marketers in the category often lose sight of how traditional, and in many ways analog, this category is as they overlook some of the foundational elements of wine & spirit marketing. While not the most exciting, field marketing — and as I mentioned, sampling — are absolutely the first areas I look to invest in. Nothing else gets done if those two line items aren’t fully covered. There are certainly creative ways to execute field marketing, and I would argue these activations are often much more innovative with a much higher ROI than many of the stunts I see other beverage brands doing.
• Don’t chase industry “trends.” The word “trend” is often misused when people are really just referring to “norms.” Trends just sound better. But more often than not, by the time something is a “trend,” it’s already well established and no longer differentiates your brand. At Summer Water, we’re constantly thinking about how we can be authentic to our category and our 7-year brand DNA — which in many ways set the standard for how rosé has operated. And we are flattered that other brands have been inspired by our name, imagery, brand tone, etc., but we are also pushing ourselves this year to not play into category tropes or stereotypes and ensure Summer Water can be timeless and truly iconic.
• Skip the fanciest wine regions. Summer Water is proudly homegrown in the Central Coast of California, and there are a lot of advantages to that compared to sourcing our grapes from more traditionally famous rose regions like Provence. For one, there is just geographically more land to grow our grapes in, which means that we are not limited in our path to scale. Additionally, there are less regulatory restrictions in terms of yield. And by virtue of both California’s climate and the Central Coast’s larger geographic footprint, we have a more reliable and diversified supply of grapes. From a business perspective there is a lot we are able to unlock, and from a brand perspective as well as we work to bring consumers a “Summer State of Mind.”
• Embrace failure. We all want to be successful, but the only way to learn is through taking risks and making mistakes. So I’m always challenging myself to fail quickly and often, which helps normalize disappointments while accelerating learning. I ask myself, “what’s the smallest thing I can do to prove whether this works or doesn’t” and then I just do it. With repetition it doesn’t feel so scary, or bad, when something doesn’t work out if you run lots of little experiments. Even in my first few months as CEO, I’m trying new things daily and learning exponentially.

Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the industry?

I love the increasing focus on balance. I have wild conviction behind the non- and low-alc movement, as well as the shifts toward sugar free, which Summer Water is very proud of. The consumer is more educated and empowered than ever before, which leads to my next favorite shift: the growing obsession with quality for value. With inflation at an all time high, our consumer is doing her homework, rightfully so, to make sure she is spending in the best way possible. It’s my mission to make sure she knows that she can count on Summer Water to give her award winning wine at an approachable price. And lastly, one that we are working very hard on alongside our peers is sustainability across our entire value chain. We are proud to be a domestic wine company, which means we aren’t shipping our product around the world and we have complete visibility and control over our supply chain to make sure everything and everyone is treated responsibly. As a brand that stands for all the best things that summer and California has to offer, it’s imperative that we become completely sustainable over the next two years.

Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to reform or improve the industry, what would you suggest?

• The first and probably most obvious frustration lies with the three tier and the inefficiencies it drives. Overall, I would love to reform our country’s antiquated alcohol laws to make the relationship between brands and consumers more direct and more consistent nationally. This creates frustrations for everyone at every tier.
• Despite this high level of regulation in one area, there is little protection of the consumer in another area. I’d like to remove the extreme opacity that brands can get away with in the space. I’m continually surprised that wine & spirit companies are able to not communicate basic facts about their products such as sugar content or are able to send confusing messages about where their product is from. Summer Water is highly transparent about all of this, which I now view as a competitive advantage even though it shouldn’t be!
• And lastly, while diversity is improving in the industry, it isn’t progressing at the rate it should. I try at every opportunity to hire female partners in everything we do when it is possible. But gender is just one, very obvious, area that needs to be addressed. The future of wine & spirits depends upon being relevant to everyone, and quickly correcting the hiring strategy across every company will be critical to the industry’s survival in my opinion.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Action is worry’s worst enemy.” I’m a naturally anxious person, so I’ve always combatted that by constantly moving forward, running at problems, and always ideating solutions. I have trouble sitting still, which I continue to work on doing, but being busy is what fulfills me. I attribute that bias to action to my personal and professional successes throughout my life as well as the key to keeping my peace of mind when things are hard. To reference another favorite quote by Robert Frost, “The only way out is through.”

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’ve always been fascinated by and concerned with global warming since I was a child and started my school’s Earth Club. Recently I read a book by Jonathan Safran Foer, who is my favorite fiction author, who wrote a non-fiction book called “We are the Weather.” Here he makes the case that the greatest influence we as individuals can make on global warming is changing how we eat. Specifically, if everyone were to become vegan for two meals a day (which I try to do but don’t always succeed at). I love the simplicity and tangibility of that concept, as well as the fact that it’s moderate — two out of three meals a day. We should be able to do that!

Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you only continued success!