323. The Wine Quiz That Asks About Coffee, Not Wine - Janie Brooks Heuck, Brooks Wine

323. The Wine Quiz That Asks About Coffee, Not Wine - Janie Brooks Heuck, Brooks Wine

Most wine quizzes ask people what kind of wine they like. The problem, as Janie Brooks Heuck points out, is that most people don't know. If someone doesn't know whether they prefer a citrusy white or a floral one, a quiz built on that question won't get them anywhere useful.

Janie is managing director of Brooks Wine, the Oregon winery her brother Jimmy founded in 1998. She has led it since 2004, having previously co-founded Silver Sneakers, a fitness benefit programme for Medicare eligibles. That background in marketing and data sits behind a lot of what Brooks has built since, including a palate quiz that's quietly solving one of DTC wine's hardest problems: helping people choose between dozens of products they know nothing about.

Ask About Coffee, Not Wine

The quiz Brooks launched last week doesn't ask about wine at all, at least not directly. It asks roughly twenty simple questions: do you like black coffee, do you take creamer, do you like green peppers. The platform behind it, built by a company that started with in-store kiosks at retailers, has collected data from millions of people answering these same questions and has matched the results against the chemistry of participating wineries' actual products, including Brooks'.

"Those are the kinds of questions on there," Janie said. "The questions are super simple." The logic is that people know their own coffee order even if they've never thought about tannin levels. Brooks organised its wines into matching collections, things like earthy Pinots, vibrant Pinots, bold reds, and dry Rieslings, so a quiz result routes someone straight to a curated shortlist instead of a fifty-plus item catalogue.

The Email Timing Fix

When the quiz first went live, Brooks asked for an email address before the questions started. People clicked through but didn't finish. The team moved email capture to the end, after the quiz delivers a result, and completion improved. It's a familiar CRO principle applied to a genuinely new format: ask for the email once you've given something worth exchanging it for.

The quiz also includes a food pairing feature. Type in what you're cooking, get a Brooks wine recommendation back. Janie sees this as one of the more useful parts of the tool given how often "what goes with this" is the actual question customers are trying to answer.

Acquisition Through a Collective, Not Just Ads

Brooks is running the quiz through Meta ads aimed at lookalike audiences built from existing club member zip codes, but the more structurally interesting move is the Wine Atlas Collective, a year-old partnership between Brooks and seven other independently owned US wineries. A club member at any one of the eight gets treated as a member everywhere else: free tastings, the same purchase discounts, both in person and online.

It started from a practical observation. A club member in Oregon can visit Brooks regularly. A member in Missouri might make it once every few years. The collective extends the relationship geographically without merging the businesses or sharing customer databases. Validation runs through a shared API tied to the wineries' common POS system, checking club membership by email at the point of visit.

Loyalty Without an Expiry Date

Brooks' loyalty points don't expire. Members earn them on purchases, referrals, birthdays, and for returning reusable wine bags as part of a sustainability programme. Janie noted that Brooks' average club tenure runs longer than the industry standard, something she credits in part to this approach, even though it removes a common re-engagement trigger that an expiring balance would create.

Shipping Costs as an Acquisition Barrier

Shipping a case of wine to the East Coast costs Brooks around $150, and close to $100 to the West Coast. That's before accounting for the fact that every US state has different alcohol shipping laws, and Brooks holds permits, with separate annual renewals and monthly tax filings, in 47 states.

To lower the barrier for new customers, Brooks is considering 180ml sample bottles, rebottled by a licensed third-party partner the Wine Atlas Collective has already used for shared tasting sets. At $45-60, positioned as a gift item, it offers a way to get Brooks wine into someone's mouth, in Janie's words, without asking them to commit to a $150 case first.

Janie Brooks Heuck joins Will Laurenson to talk through all of this and more on this episode of Customers Who Click.