California wine club uses baseball to attract new members
Sonoma County’s Balletto Vineyards has welcomed a flurry of new members to its wine club, using one unconventional attraction to entice patrons: baseball.
Balletto Vineyards in Sonoma’s Santa Rosa is attracting new members to its wine club with baseball games hosted on its estate.
The winery welcomed 500 people over the weekend to watch the second annual Old Timey Baseball Event held at the winery.
Players dressed in vintage uniforms, with old-school gloves and bats, and played by rules drawn up in 1886, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, where this story was first reported.
John Balletto, who founded the winery in 2001, said the baseball games had proved to be successful in attracting a younger crowd of consumers to the winery.
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“Getting customers under 40 years old is very difficult,” Balletto said. “I think you need to be creative in today’s world. The competition is very fierce out there for customers.”
Amy Lieberfarb, Balletto’s director of marketing and communications, said enthusiasm for the events has boosted business for the estate’s wine club. “We had such a demand that people were joining the wine club just to come to the event,” she explained.
Wine clubs are facing stagnating membership numbers in the US. According to Silicon Valley Bank’s 2025 Direct-to-Consumer Survey, the average wine club growth rate for 2024 was just 2%, down from 11% in 2018.
However, Balletto Vineyards is bucking the trend, with year-on-year growth up 30% in 2025. “We’ve been very fortunate during this time to keep our club members intact and actually grow our wine club,” said Balletto.
Its success suggests that more wine clubs should be widening their offering to include non-wine-related events and activities to boost tourism. Wine consumption in the US is experiencing a decline, with both sales volume and per capita consumption decreasing. As such, engaging consumers through other means is an essential method of reinvigorating oenotourism.
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