Benchmark Wine Group Reviews

Turnover at BWG is extremely high as a result of below average pay and no career progression opportunities. Employees often joke they should just install a revolving door at the entry because turnover is so bad. The HR department does a great job of hiring talent and an absolutely atrocious one of retaining talent. The company focus is definitely on sinking profits into lavish events and marketing that thus far have failed to create any new business, rather than in spending on retaining employees who actually were helping the company grow. Upper management has no wine experience between them, literally zero years combined experience. The company owner is an incredibly smart man with tons of wine experience, but he lives out of state and is only in the office a few days per year and I get the sense that he really has no idea what working here is like the other 95% of the time when he is gone. Mid-level employees who demonstrate wine knowledge or a desire to gain such knowledge almost seem to be shunned. The company just does not care if you bring a wealth of experience, and from the management perspective it seems like they would almost prefer that you didn't. The office is very cliquey. The senior managers have their favorites (generally speaking, people who don't know anything about wine) and it will not take you long to figure out who those are. Talking about fashion non-stop definitely helps, talking about wine...not so much. Apart from "Let's grow 25% per year" there is not much of a plan as how exactly to do that. One week it's one initiative and the next week it is the exact opposite, almost comically so. While health benefits are good, pay and PTO is well below average, for the industry and the region. The HR department seems to be constantly having to put out fires stemming from former employees who quit or were let go. The fact that there even needs to be an HR Department for a family-owned company of 25ish people should tell you something. The market BWG operates in is very niche. This is both a good and bad thing. On one hand you work with incredibly rare and expensive wines, but on the other hand the experience really does not translate to many other jobs. I would only recommend working here if you are desperate for an entry level position to help you break into the industry. But even then you are going to gain much better experience, better networks, and better pay by working in a tasting room or a wine cellar elsewhere.

Not very well managed, poor leadership. The owner of the company lives in another state., the Vice President lives in another state, and the President averages a few half days per week. You are left with a very comfortable middle management team and a revolving door of low level employees. You will not make much money here. No one in sales makes commission. You will work hard to make very lofty goals. If you hit these goals you will be rewarded with cupcakes, wine that they were going to throw away, or at best a borderline insulting quarterly bonus. The general attitude seems to be that you are replaceable. I second another reviewers comment about the triumvirate. The catty, cliquey office culture, and the favoritism this breeds is detrimental to employees morale. Also, if you are a guy, don't bother applying to the sales or customer service teams. In my years of working at Benchmark there have been about 17 people that have gone through those 2 departments (each one being a team of about 3!). One of those was male.