The FlorVino plan
The plan
Why FlorVino wins, where customers come from, and the four fronts in the order that pays.
You have won medals for
four years running
Every one of the six wines has medalled every year since 2023. Two Platinums. Six class championships. Gold at the San Francisco International Wine Competition in three separate years.
None of it appears anywhere in FlorVino's marketing. Not on the website, not on social, not on the shelf talker, not on the door.
This is the single biggest opportunity in the plan. A wine made from flowers invites one of two reactions: how interesting, or how gimmicky. A wall of medals decides which one people land on before they have even tasted it. It turns a curiosity into a wine.
Every part of this plan now carries the medals: the door, the cards, the posts, the press pitch.
Where the customers
actually come from
This surprised me, and it changed the whole plan. Before writing a single post I went looking for where people who walk into a place like FlorVino actually come from. It is not Instagram.
Social media matters. It is just not first, and building the plan as though it were would have put the effort in the wrong place.
The last number is the one that changed my thinking most. Reviews are usually the hard part, and FlorVino has already won that fight. The problem is that nobody outside Google can see it.
Good news on the second piece: the Google listing is confirmed claimed, so FlorVino can already reply to every one of those 398 reviews, control which searches it appears in, and post to the listing. At roughly twenty new reviews a month, that is twenty guests who took the trouble to write something. Replying to all of them is free reach nobody is using yet.
The wine already
does the work
Every public review of FlorVino says the same three things in the same order. I had never heard of this. They gave me a taste. I bought bottles.
"We were offered a complimentary wine tasting from one of the servers as we walked by to visit the Alamo. We were blown away. We purchased a couple to take home."
Jamie G, Spindale, North Carolina · TripAdvisor · Five starsThat is the whole business model, and it happened by accident. Someone standing outside offered a stranger a taste, and the stranger became a customer in fifteen minutes.
The plan below is mostly about making that happen on purpose, more often, and making sure the people it happens to leave a review and post a video afterwards.
Four fronts, in the order
that actually pays
The Door
Everything within 200 feet of the entrance: an A frame with the tasting price, a window that says what is inside, signage that survives the Houston Street construction, and the free taste offered to people walking past.
Spend the Reviews
You already have the hard half. The QR code has produced 398 reviews in 20 months, 395 of them five stars, at about 20 a month. Most independent businesses never get there, and nothing about how you collect them needs to change. What is missing is everywhere else: that rating lives on Google only, not the door, not the window, not the website, not a single post.
The Feed
Instagram and Facebook, three posts a week, on the same three days every week. Built around one behaviour: someone sending a post to a friend who is coming to San Antonio.
Press
FlorVino has no consumer press coverage at all. A California flower winery earned Wine Enthusiast and the San Francisco Chronicle on the same idea without spending anything.
The story you already own
and are not telling
I had Spirit Hills filed as a competitor. It is not. It is the same family, and that changes the strongest thing FlorVino has.
Here is what is public and checkable today. Hugo Bonjean runs Spirit Hills in Alberta, the CBC describes the family as coming from a long line of French winemakers, and their winery makes wine without grapes from dandelions and wild roses. Spirit Hills' own site puts the family's arrival in Alberta at 1997. Three of your six wines carry names that Spirit Hills has been selling for years: Dande, Wild Rosy and Yeehaa.
None of that is on the Our Story page. The page names the Bonjean family and calls it a nearly forgotten craft, and then gives no date, no place and no person. It says "years of blooms and batches" and "season after season." A reader finishes it knowing nothing they could repeat to a friend.
That is the proof problem, in one page. The medals answer "is this any good." The family answers "is this a gimmick," and it answers it harder than a medal does, because thirty years is not something a novelty brand can fake. It is also the difference between a press pitch that lands and one that does not. A new flower winery opening downtown is not a story. A family that has made wine without grapes for three decades, now pouring on Alamo Plaza, is one.
Good news, most of this is answered. Seven generations, Alberta then Texas after Covid, and you are fine saying it out loud rather than keeping it quiet. Where in France the family started is answered now too, see Where things stand. That is what turns this into the specific version instead of the vague one, and it rewrites the Our Story page, the press pitch and half the September posts.
One thing to protect you on
Easy to fix now, awkward later, and it is smaller than I first thought.
FlorVino should still not describe itself as the world's only flower winery, or the first. A winery in Oakland has made wine from hibiscus, rose and lavender since 2018, with coverage in Wine Enthusiast and the San Francisco Chronicle, and there are others in Los Angeles, Brooklyn and England. Spirit Hills is off that list now, but the rest of it still turns up in one search.
The home page currently opens with THE WORLD'S MOST UNIQUE WINERY. That is the line I would change. It invites a fact check and it says nothing. The lines already in the footer and on Our Story are stronger and all of them are true. Crafted from wildflowers, never grapes. A nearly forgotten craft, revived by the Bonjean family. Where we want scarcity, Texas' only flower winery holds up.
The sommelier quote is a smaller problem than I flagged before. An earlier version of that page had the Eric Beaumard line praising Spirit Hills by name. Since that is the same family, the honest fix is a wording change rather than pulling it: praise for the family's flower wine, not for a specific bottle it may not have been about. Worth settling before it goes on a poster.
How we will know
it worked
Five numbers, once a month, no dashboard.
- Google reviews. It sits at 398 today and runs at about twenty a month. The QR code already does this, so the job is holding the 5.0, not chasing volume.
- Sends on video posts. Whether people are forwarding it to a friend, which is what Instagram rewards.
- Saves on the wine carousels.
- Reach and followers, both platforms, against the month before.
- How many people at the bar say they saw us before they came in. Crude, and the most honest number in the list.
One target beyond that: at least one real press feature by December 31.
Worth saying plainly: there is no baseline yet. Nobody has recorded FlorVino's reach or follower numbers, so the first thing I do is capture where we are starting from. Otherwise none of the above means anything in January.