Innovative procedure at a tasting

I was pouring last week at the Long Beach Grand Cru, when I noticed that there were sheets of paper (which were numbered and separated into columns) at our table stacked on a clipboard. The wines we were pouring also had individually marked 4-digit numbers taped to the bottles. Also, (didn’t notice this all until it was explained) the public were issued a different set of numbers on their wristbands.

One of the volunteers informed me that they had devised a new set-up for the tasting… where, if people liked a certain wine, they could give the pourer their wristband #, and then indicate which wine they liked, and you wrote down the wristband and the wines’ number. After the tasting, the organizers entered all the data, and emailed the attendees a list of wines they liked at the tasting.

I thought that was pretty cool! Better than the public going around with brochures that could be lost or never looked at again, and helps circumvent the problem of the taster forgetting to mark down which wines they liked. Good for them, and hope to see this procedure in use again at another tasting.

Cheers,

Great idea…thanks. I am curious, though. Why 4-digit numbers for the wine? There couldn’t have been 10,000 wines poured. Was there something else to their numbering system?

I’d think it would be easier to number the wines poured once and for all, so that if somebody finds his bracelet back 3 months later and can’t remember which event he attended, you can still tell that person that he liked wine XYZ. I’m assuming that these kinds of tastings will happen several times in a row.

I love this idea. I’m not sure how I would implement it, but I do want to try!

I suspect the 4 digit wine numbers are really two 2 digit numbers: XX for the winery, and YY for wines. So if my winery was number 26, and I was pouring three wines, I would number them 2601, 2602, 2603. Winery 17 would have their 1701, 1702, and so forth…

Jeff, Good call! That is how they did it.

It would definitely make things easier for consumers, and benefit the producers. Hope to see this used again.

I like the concept of the tasting for sure. Getting consumers to “remember” which wines they liked at a walkaround format tasting is a challenge. I’d love to know how the sales stacked up against other tastings with booklets. The loose footings as I see them are the reliance on the supplier/pourer to accurately account customer’s # and the fact that though the customer is emailed what they liked, you still put them in a position to not buy the wine. My best success comes at the event, in the store, product in hand, and buyer jazzed up after tasting to walk with wine.

Here is a “what if” …

Is there an inexpensive way to have small groups of two-sided biz cards made up. On one side, it has all the info about the winery, website etc., found on a normal biz card. The other side has info on one of the specific wines in your portfolio. The person could then walk away with each wine that they really liked, by taking a card. I realize this is not going to be cheap, but it may drive some new business. I am sure there are reasons why this has been tried or may not work … but just trying to think out of the box.

…or a list of the wines with check boxes on the back side of the card. Something like that could be made by the event organizers, so they’d be standardized.

Something like that could be done with an iPhone app. Just a bump to “collect” the wine. Then you could easily add notes, if desired. Should be lots of tech ways to do something like this. The app idea could just be an industry standard across platforms and seen in tasting rooms, restaurants and such, too. Input with a bump or UPC scan.

I see device rentals at different sorts of events, like pit scanners at motorsports events, so something like that could happen, too. (Though it’s easy to imagine someone doing this wrong.)

Considering the advances made with Smartphones and scanners, how about this. Implement the barcode you were talking about with business cards, one side has producer/rep/wine makers name and contact info, the other side has the barcode. The barcode would point you NOT towards a specic wine, but rather a data base of the wines from that producer. From there you can just bookmark the page and you’re set.