It seems like a supply problem. Wineries, breweries, distilleries, and roasters. I wish you good luck.
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Hey Tom – yeah, there’s some of that, but I think it varies a lot. On the coffee side, green coffee from producers shot up in 2021-22, and now we’re all saddled with ~50% inflation, and prices are not going down (though there are some cheaper green coffee options out there). That pushed up prices. The US Postal Service adding many $$$ to the price of a first class package has not helped. Surely some people are buying less DTC (wine, coffee, you name it) due to the significant bump in prices over the past 12 months.
Cheers.
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Hey, no worries! 
Didn’t know there was a visitor cap in Napa so (sadly) it makes sense to do what you’re saying.
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Yeah, it creates a weird dynamic. But I totally get the frustration. I live here and would love to try as many wineries as I could, but it’s too expensive to go very often!
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Talk to any wholesaler or distributor too and sales are significantly down this year. It’s across the board.
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on a broad scale, i think some consumers who are content with carrying credit card debt are learning the reality of an apr over 20%. and the car payments some people are willing to take on relative to their overall income is just laughable.
eventually something has to give with spending.
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GregT nailed it, at least for me.
Like several others above have noted, my ideal tasting room visit is definitely NOT a structured sit-down, pour in order, tell me what each wine is from a memorized script, and then charged $50 for the experience. I can’t stand that. I would far prefer to walk in, no appointment necessarily, and be handed a list of available wines to taste, go at my pace, chat up the pourer if I want, and then make some buying decisions. A modest fee is fine, but I’d appreciate it being credited back with a reasonable purchase.
I spend, like the majority here, far more on wine than the average consumer. I used to buy a lot from my tasting room experiences, but the high fees, appointments required, and structured, forced tastings are such a turn-off, that my visits to tasting rooms have nearly gone to zero.
A recent tasting at Terra Blanca (at the base of Red Mountain in WA) was the epitome of what I abhor in a tasting room experience. My wife and I were headed to San Point, ID from Yakima, WA and decided we wanted to stop at a single winery to taste. It was early, so only one (that we could easily find) was open at 10:30, and this was it. I’ve had their wines, some are good, so why not? We were the only people there tasting the entire time. The host gave us the list, told us to go, “have a seat at the table…” [while talking with us over a perfectly large tasting bar], and then charged $35 each to pour us one ounce of wine. One ounce. She was so careful to pour the smallest little thimble pour of wine that it was truly difficult to taste some of the samples and, if a fluid ounce is roughly 2 tbsp of water, we were getting a teaspoon, no exaggeration. Seven wines tasted equals $5 per “one-ounce” pour. Refunded with a $100 (I think) purchase. She’d pour a pitifully shy one ounce, give us the memorized data, and walk away. We’d have to signal her to come pour the next wine. Again, we were the only ones there. We paid our tasting fee and left.
With so many structured, expensive tasting experiences now, we’re out.
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I had an experience similar to this at Sleight of Hand in SODO. I’m sure their regular “tasting” is more structured but, since I was the only person there, the host (who I believe was not the owner nor winemaker) just spent time with me and poured liberally according to my preferences. Fee was relatively small. It didn’t hurt that the wines were great.
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I’ve heard great things about that tasting room experience at SOH.
For any tasting, and I frequently spit as I would have at Terra Blanca, I need a sufficient amount of wine to taste a couple of times, swirl, etc. What we were poured was nowhere close to that.
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Yes, I’m biased as a local, but I have to point out that there are still a lot of great tasting options in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Both at historic wineries, and at up and coming places. $20 seems to be the going rate right now at many mid-tiers, with fair purchasing thresholds for waived fees. Worth a try if you feel priced out up north or down south.
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There are urban wineries with tasting rooms all over the Bay Area, especially Oakland and Berkeley, but SF down to SJ. The point with most or all is you can just drop in and they aren’t priced like some high-end experience, that they are designed to welcome and turn on novices.
If you want a destination vacation, Uli is right. You could stay in Santa Cruz at whatever level and type of accommodation. There are plenty of urban wineries and tasting rooms in town and more nearby (like a day trip to Corralitos), plus good restaurants, night life, the beach, hiking, etc. (Most of the wineries are on that side of the mountains, but you probably wouldn’t want to stay there if your focus is bay side wineries.)
I know a lot of people who go out to the Sierra foothills regularly for a rustic, affordable vacation. There are excellent winery and restaurant options. Monterey County is another good option.
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What kind of volume and how does a winery decide what to set aside for tastings over a season? Obviously it’s going to vary but I bet it’s more than I would have guessed?
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We don’t have a big tasting room but not a small one either. We charge $50 so 400 tasting fees would be like 1/day but, again, if you take out some events and lunches it’s well under $10,000 so with our rate of visitation that’s a massively minor amount of charged tasting fees.
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Thanks Jim, sorry if I wasn’t clear. I was wondering what kind of volume does a normal tasting room pour? It must be a considerable part of the years harvest to support the tasting room.
It’s not insubstantial but it’s not like some insane amount.
Last year I was in Uruguay on business, and one day they’d booked a winery visit outside Montevideo for us unwashed. Can’t recall the name of winery right now, but it was basically a small estate. One of the barns had been turned into a restaurant and the flight and wine tasting was part of the restaurant visit and the meal. Food was great and the winery guy was explaining how it was made and what it would pair with, but there was no tasting menu designed to go with each wine etc, you could order whatever you wanted on their menu a la carte. They just lined up the glasses and started with a few whites and then moved into the reds. I loved it - it was a great, relaxed experience. If I ever did a tasting room, I’d do it as part of a food experience and in a restaurant setting like that. And also so liberating not having them try to pair it with dishes and bloviate. Much more relaxed and enjoyable this way.
Not sure why it isn’t always done this way.
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Any restaurant in wine country could do this theoretically. Or any winery with a restaurant on premises that wants to deal with that business too. Which is to say, what you experienced is well outside the realm of what most wineries can do on a day to day basis. Plus, you were a captive audience, booked for an event. You weren’t just tourists rolling through wine country.
So that you lot don’t feel alone, we are seeing some of the same trends in Ontario. A couple–not many–of the high-end wineries have gone to appointment-only and have closed the doors to general public. A number of the others have a hybrid approach…they do have a tasting room with attendant for the drop-ins, but the value experience is the 1-hour or so tasting experience. The difference is the price—most of these don’t clost more than USD$40 per person. I have heard the same–that tasting room business has been a little slow to return, but the upswing is being seen so far this year (though we have had unhappily cold weather here too).
For me it’s still—as it is, honestly, in California—about planning, contacting people you know or really want to visit with—and making those visits count/matter. I have myself “transitioned” from the 6+ wineries-a-day to doing maybe 3 or 4 or so and getting an in-depth experience
Adam—I had 4 friends who know their stuff come back recently from an Uruguay trip and were also wowed to the hilt. They loved their winery experiences.
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I understand that most wineries probably don’t want to be in the restaurant business. That’s a huge undertaking, I get it. I just feel that the connection food + wine often gets lost in most tasting rooms. It’s approached as if we’re selling either perfume or beer.
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I would say its never present in ‘tasting rooms’. Because food is not what they are there for. At least here in the States. Most wine consumers here are not interested in the classic sort of pairing in the European tradition as we might expect it anyway.
In your example you were not in a tasting room but enjoying a planned meal with a set tasting menu. It happened to be all from one winery because that is where it is hosted. That might have been the business plan from the start.
There are restaurants than offer tasting menu add-ons and such. Those tend to be only in higher end restaurants and are price prohibitive. I think a lot of this is cultural though. Americans are mostly not that interest in real food pairings. They mostly want to drink something they like with food they like. Wineries are not a convenient place to change that. Especially given all the other costs they face in wine regions.
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