The person building your systems also pours your wine.

That’s the short version. The longer version is the story of someone who spent nearly 30 years building enterprise digital systems for Fortune 500 companies — and chose to bring all of it to bear on independent tasting rooms, taprooms, and wine bars, at a price and pace that makes sense for operators who don’t have an IT department.

I’m Matt Dinovo, and I founded My Pub Marketing to close the gap between a guest’s first visit and their long-term loyalty. I also work two floor jobs in Central Ohio wine service — self-serve at Uncorked Wine Tastings in Dublin, hands-on pouring at Carfagna’s Market and Ristorante in Columbus. I built Uncorked’s digital systems, and I work the shift that breaks them when they don’t hold. That’s not a resume line. It’s a different kind of vantage point.

Three perspectives most consultants can’t replicate

My approach is built on three views of the same guest journey — held at the same time.

As a Guest (15+ Years)

Long before My Pub Marketing existed, I was paying close attention from the other side of the bar.

My engagement with craft beverage culture started with beer. Since 2013, I’ve logged over 3,600 check-ins across nearly 2,750 unique beers on Untappd — visiting breweries and taprooms across Ohio and well beyond during the years when the American craft beer movement was building something genuinely new. I watched independent breweries scramble to build digital audiences and member loyalty — mug clubs, taproom apps, loyalty programs — with almost no technical support and no budget for the kind of systems that would have made it work. I was paying close attention to what small producers were trying to build long before I started helping them build it.

The same pattern appeared when I turned toward wine. The first tasting was Buenos Aires, 2013 — three glasses of Malbec at a winery outside the city, no WSET vocabulary for it yet, just the sense that it mattered. Since then I’ve visited tasting rooms across three continents: California’s Central Coast and Carneros, the twin peninsulas of Northern Michigan, the schist terraces of Portugal’s Douro Valley, the volcanic hillsides of Santorini, stone rooms in Tuscany, Ontario’s Niagara Escarpment, and the high-altitude Uco Valley in Mendoza. I’ve held wine club memberships on and off for over a decade, including past stints with Tamber Bey and Viansa. I know what it feels like when a shipment notification goes dark, when a member portal breaks on mobile, or when the value proposition of renewal quietly stops making sense.

I’ve also been on the other side of that door as a host. I manage The Northern Nook, a vacation rental on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula, which means I’ve spent as much time worrying about a five-star stay turning into a second booking as I have about a wine club member renewing. Same problem, different bar.

What I noticed — across every region, every price point, every style of craft beverage — was the same gap. Great operators, running genuinely excellent programs, losing guests they didn’t have to lose. Not because the product wasn’t good enough. Because the moment after the visit was unmanaged.

As a Floor Attendant — Both Ends of the Bar

In October 2025, I joined Uncorked Wine Tastings as a part-time tasting room attendant. Uncorked is self-serve by design: I hand guests a tasting card, show them the pour machines, and handle the wine club pitch in real time. I’ve also worked opening nights at another Central Ohio wine venue.

In June 2026, I added a second floor role: Winetender at Carfagna’s Market and Ristorante in Columbus, pouring and explaining eight themed flights that rotate monthly — roughly 40 new wines a month — for wine club members and paying guests. Where Uncorked is self-serve, Carfagna’s is hands-on: manual pour, direct explanation, one guest at a time.

Between the two, I cover both ends of consumer wine service — the systems-driven experience and the person-driven one. Working the floor puts me inside the operational reality my clients live every day — not theorizing from a strategy deck, but inside it. I see where the guest journey breaks in real time: the member whose digital perks won’t load at checkout, the enrollment that falls apart because the signup flow requires three steps too many, the Friday night where the POS slows down exactly when the room is fullest.

Enterprise tech consultants can describe these problems. I experience them.

As an Enterprise Architect (Nearly 30 Years)

My first computer was a Commodore 64. I was a kid in the early 1980s — the first generation to grow up with a home computer — and the feedback loop hooked me early: give the machine a clear instruction, and it does what you ask. That logic shaped everything that followed.

I started doing software consulting at 19, during a summer break from school. In 1999 I joined Intel’s Sales & Marketing Applications organization, and from 2003 onward I’ve worked in technology professional services in some form continuously — a span that now runs to nearly 30 years. Along the way, I spent six years as a sales engineer and architect for a SaaS vendor, which means I’ve been on that side of the table too. I know exactly how platform vendors think about referral relationships, and it’s part of why I don’t participate in them.

The delivery side of that career ran through firms like Accenture and Sitecore, building digital infrastructure for companies like P&G, Visa, and Comcast. Along the way, I earned a U.S. patent for dynamic content delivery architecture (No. 7,139,814), managed a $30 million sales pipeline, and led a 20-person technical practice.

I describe myself, only half-jokingly, as a recovered architect — I traded PowerPoint for a wine key and don’t miss the deck. The enterprise world taught me how to build systems that hold under load. My Pub Marketing is my choice to be both again instead of picking one — applying that same rigor to independent tasting rooms, at a scale and price point a three-person operation can actually afford.

The problem I keep seeing

The taproom is full. The tasting room is packed. The wine is excellent, the beer is exceptional, the hospitality is genuine. And somewhere between the guest’s first visit and their third, the relationship quietly disappears.

The email list sits untouched. The club pitch falls apart at checkout because joining requires navigating three screens on a busy Saturday night. A member’s digital perks won’t load at the register. The follow-up that should have gone out the morning after the visit — the one that would have brought them back — never went out at all.

These are not small problems. They’re the reason independent hospitality operators lose repeat revenue between visits. And they’re almost never a hospitality problem. They’re a digital infrastructure problem — the kind that gets solved with systems, not staff.

What happens when the systems actually work

Uncorked Wine Tastings opened in Dublin, Ohio in September 2025. By December, the opening-buzz traffic had crested and the site was losing roughly 500 sessions a month with nothing to replace them — no organic search presence, no consistent email voice, no digital foundation underneath the launch energy.

My Pub Marketing took over on January 9, 2026. These are the results from the first 82 days:

Email. Open rates climbed from 52.4% to 65.7%. Click rates doubled to 3.36%. Unsubscribes fell by more than half. The hospitality industry average sits at 25–35%; Uncorked is running at two to two-and-a-half times that.

Organic search. The site had produced zero organic traffic in its first five months. My Pub Marketing built the channel from scratch: 490 clicks and 8,549 impressions in 82 days, at a 5.7% click-through rate — roughly twice the hospitality benchmark. Impressions grew 24% month-over-month.

Traffic. Projected to reach 300–400 monthly sessions by February. Actual: approximately 1,400. The free fall was arrested. An organic channel that didn’t exist now drives consistent daily visitors.

Guest retention. Repeat visits increased 15% after implementing automated post-visit follow-up flows. The workflow wasn’t complex — it was consistent: the right message, to the right guest, at the right moment after their visit. The kind of system that looks obvious in retrospect and is invisible until someone builds it.

The member platform. Built and maintained as part of the ongoing retainer, the Uncorked companion app is live on the App Store today — the White Label Member Portal isn’t a mockup or a pitch deck slide, it’s a system guests are actually using.

The wine and beverage background

Alongside this work, I operate Matt Dinovo Wine Consulting — a registered DBA offering private and group tastings, wine program design, staff education, and guest education programming to hospitality operators and private clients. The consulting practice is based at mattdinovo.wine.

I hold a WSET Level 2 Award in Wines with Distinction (passed July 2026), having previously completed Level 1 in October 2025. I’m also ServSafe certified with an Ohio Alcohol Server Knowledge certification.

My firsthand tasting experience spans California (Napa, Sonoma, Carneros, and the Central Coast), Northern Michigan’s Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas — including Blustone, Rove, MAWBY, Bel Lago, and Three Trees — Portugal’s Douro Valley, Tuscany, Santorini’s volcanic pumice vineyards, Ontario’s Niagara Escarpment, and the high-altitude Uco Valley in Mendoza.

I pursued formal wine education for the same reason I work the floor: operators take you more seriously when you understand the product, not just the platform. When I talk about club tiers, seasonal releases, or the guest experience around a Friday night flight, I’m drawing on time behind the bar and years in the cellar — not slides from a vendor briefing.

What My Pub Marketing is not

My Pub Marketing is not an agency with layered handoffs. There is no account team, no project manager, no junior consultant who builds what a senior consultant designed. The person who designed your system is the same person who operates and fixes it on a Friday night.

I don’t earn referral fees or platform kickbacks. If a free tool does the job, I’ll say so. If the problem isn’t a technology problem, I’ll say that too. I’ll always point you to the least expensive, most straightforward solution that actually works, even when it means less work for me. No fluff.

What’s in the name

Pub carries a dual meaning — both chosen deliberately.

Publisher: I ship systems and outcomes into the world, not slide decks.

Public House: practical knowledge shared plainly, without ego or performance.

That’s the bar I’m tending. I just happen to also hold the patent on part of the infrastructure running underneath it.

Start with one real leak

The best first step is not a pitch call. It’s a focused look at one specific place where your guest journey is losing revenue.

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