I am going off memory - I don’t recall discussing a tasting fee at Goodfellow or Vincent. A quick email search of my inbox shows me there were fees at Martin Woods, Patricia Green, Morgen Long and Kelley Fox. I purchased at all 6 and end of day there may not have been any/many fees involved but I still think I paid 1-2 fees even with some of my purchases but I could be wrong.
could you do tastings for free, sure I am sure if I wanted to spend the time finding “Free” places I could, but my intention of the trip was to try a broad range of wines that were interesting to me (either read about them or tasted maybe 1 or 2 offerings and wanted to try more of their range)
Not that it’s 100% relevant to this thread but anyone here that lets us know they’re a Berserker and we waive the tasting fee regardless of purchase. Have for over a decade.
its all good @Jim_Anderson - though that was not offered to us and the host knew we were WB’ers - and joked that you were hiding in the back - we purchased 6 bottles and the fee was waived. And in fact as I referenced in my trip notes report, your host was fantastic, figured out what my wife liked, and what I liked from the general tasting, and poured some additional wines for us that knocked it out of the park and that is what we wound up buying.
Please note, I am not complaining about tasting fees. I’ve traveled the world and tasted in Austria, Spain, New Zealand, Argentina and closer to home in the Finger Lakes and the North Fork of LI and tasting fees are part of it. I am just saying the expense of the flight + hotel + fees + car rental + driver, etc gets very expensive, and I can see why in an economy where people are tightening their belts, this is a trip to put off. If I was local and just go for the day to taste at 1-2 places that changes the economics greatly.
No, I get it and appreciate both your business and your nice words. I’m just putting it out there for others who may be considering coming to Oregon and don’t know.
I was disappointed that Jason didn’t take the obvious step of correlating tasting room traffic with online sales, or giving us wholesale percentages. Yes the weather was bad, but if online sales go up when weather is bad, then we are all good. If both online AND visitors drop, then we are in trouble. I, and most of my NorCal small producer friends are definitely in big trouble. Wine shops that carry me have frozen purchasing, my distributor kicked me off all of my visits to accommodate bigger brands with more muscles, and wine club member keep telling me how Napa wineries are emailing with 40% discounts all the time now.
Small brands (which Tablas IS NOT) need to rely on something, and often a tasting room is the only space that they can control. It is quaint to say that we shouldn’t rely on that but distributors who don’t pay and cut you at the drop of a hat shouldn’t be relied on either for small brands, leaving us with??? I agree with the principle, and I have been trying to close my tasting room for 18 months, but the 47 distributors I have been working on for a year and a half haven’t yielded a single yes, even with 95-point reviews and relatively affordable pricing, just a lot of “we really like the wines but can’t bring a new brand on now” over and over. I think it worked while it worked, and all of this clarity in hindsight is correct, but just that. We are still in the post-Covid epoch, with rising interest rates to boot. The big brands will be fine like always.
Thanks Pietro for truthful experiences. Very rare in the wine business and I appreciate it.
I don’t want to turn this into a woe the winemakers thread, but I’m seeing the same thing as you. One of my importers has now not paid his invoice for 11 months, and everyone else is constantly dragging it months past due dates and only pay after endless hassling. Sales across the board down by a significant amount.
I also keep getting offers from Napa that shows the problem isn’t just at the smaller producers, it’s at the very top end, too. Just this week I got my allocation from a ‘Harlan-connected’ winery that makes themselves out to be very hard to get allocated, won’t allow you to resale the wines within 2 years, yadda yadda, yet I’ve never bought from them and thought I’d left the mailing list, so…
We’re in for a rough ride. I hope we can all weather the storm.
Thanks Adam, yes we definitely don’t want to be the doom-and-gloom winery, but if you told me 12 months ago that my - admittedly fragile, urban, 20-something heavy - tasting room would be down 70% in a year, and my main distributor would freeze my sales to concentrate on higher volume/margin, I wouldn’t have believed it. In 2008/9 I was starting out and had nowhere to go but up, but a retraction of this magnitude - and I was trying so hard to get distribution over the last year to soften the coming blow - has me looking for work and freezing production this year. 'Tis a bummer when the wine is as good as ever, imho…
Oh, and online direct ordering (removing BerserkerDay which was down 35% this year for me) is down 60%, even with free delivery and discounts. That is what has me bummed the most.
As for tasting fees - I opened at $10 for 10 tastes since I have been making too many wines. I am now at $35 for 7 tastes (about 10 ounces), comped with two-bottle purchase, and you can buy bottles of wine for $20 from me at the tasting room. Sometimes people (only young people) say they love the wine and still won’t buy two bottles for $5 more. Being in an urban area, anyone under the age of 35 turns me into a wine bar and has no interest in hearing about the wines, viticulture, practices (contrary to what the lagging marketeers tell you) or buying anything. My coworkers all remarked on the transformation over the last two years. That is why my tasting fees have gone up, and I hate it and it makes me sad and I feel gross about it. I am ashamed to say the cost out loud because it is so uncomfortably high. We averaged a 70% purchase rate originally, it dropped to 28% last year as our average customer age has dropped due to Gen Z influx around the tasting room, plus no parking, crime, etc. makes it challenging for older folk to visit. This is obviously an urban problem that wine country tourism does not share. But the other challenges are shared by all…
I could never make a tasting room work on paper. I think if you own the vineyard and can build on it, then I can see it working. But when on rented land/property with todays inflated commercial real estate? The overheads I got to were $10-15K a month. Am I gonna sell wine for $700/day to cover that? My back-of-the-napkin math suggest that would be unlikely. But what do I know - most wineries seem to have them, so maybe I’m the fool and not understanding?
Also, if the same overhead cost was spent on advertising - would it yield the same net results, but without the headaches of staffing? Not sure.
DM me if this is too personal to share on an open forum.
The large mainstream Napa wineries list their nominal prices way above market, then discount them to wine club members. So I guess your customers are falling for the old shopping mall jewelry trick of marking something unnaturally high and then offering a big “discount.”
Lest anyone think I am exaggerating, currently Mondavi lists their 2019 Napa Cabernet for $50. WS low is $32. A ton of retailers have it from $32-40. So they can “discount” that 20-30% to wine club members and the members still get a bad deal, plus Mondavi is making a huge profit margin without a distributor and retailers in the middle.
Mondavi lists the 2017 Reserve To Kalon Cabernet for $270. WS low is $121. That’s 56% lower than the winery price. wine.com sells that wine for $130. Still less than half the winery price.
I’m sure telling your mailing list customers that will fall on deaf ears, but I just want to know that at least one of us out there feels your pain.
I won’t deny your back of the napkin math and you know your local market better than me all the way in NJ.
One thing to consider - a “mixed use” facility. While recently in OR we visited the HiFi Bar. During the morning/afternoon it is the “Tasting Room” for Martin Woods Wine. 2-3 flights to try, easy to prepare food like cheese/meat type things. We were there in Feb, it was being run by 1 person who was serving 2-3 guests and handling the wine + food duties. At night it becomes a wine bar with live DJs or trivia night or other events, has a bit more food I think and a wine list with well over 100 labels from around the world (not just MW or OR based wines). If our hotel was closer (we were in Newberg) or if we were locals, I could 100% see going to HiFi bar and hanging out often.
Though not exactly like HiFi, we somewhat got the same vibe from Pax in Sonoma - I dont believe they do events, close/reopen with a different theme, but there was a pretty extensive BTG listing (not just formal 5 flight tastings) and food so I think they can also attract the casual wine drinker or a place to meet up with friends (though only PAX wine).
Didn’t say it would be easy, its a business But if you are in an area that cannot sustain just foot track for tasting of your wine, a mixed use facility could generate the money needed. But yes, at that point, like HiFi, it is almost a separate business entity.
The tasting rooms near us in the Grand Valley AVA in Colorado that are busy so I would assume are doing well have regular music acts, food trucks, patios with games, fire pits, areas for dogs and good wines.
Tasting fees in the valley are in the $10-$15 range, discounted with purchase. Usually 5-6 pours.
Just an anecdote for the winemakers bravely sharing the concerns they have, the two main ‘LWS’ I go to have cut back their inventory, breadth of SKU’s, and frankly items of any WB interest. The mega producers who offer stand alone displays are getting too much traction at those shops. So I think the only Burgundy offered there is a couple of Jadot; but the entire Belle Glos single vineyards are there along with Meiomi bottlings I’d never known existed (CS, bubbly etc.).
The second one of those told me that a huge swath of their imports will also eventually be going away, so if I cared, I better act sooner rather than later.
I am in San Diego and visit SBC and Paso at least once a year.
We are not wealthy but comfortable middle class.
I have no plans to reduce my visits to these areas.
I am serious about wine but not to the extent of some here.
To me, to really experience and enjoy wine I need to walk the vineyards and talk with wine makers, taste from barrels, discover new places.
Ordering wine from a website and have it show up at my front door does not give me the same enjoyment. I do occasionally find smokin deals on some of the wines I have discovered on my trips and do take advantage when it occurs.
Adam, I managed to get it down to about $3,500/mo. operating expense (after $14,000 Oakland zoning and another $20,000 outlay for the off-code requirements of the corrupt Alameda health department) by working there myself (except during harvest) but you get what you pay for, so I don’t have a dishwasher, it is too small to rent out and I’ve had people walk out who wanted a luxury tasting experience.
If I had it to do over again I would a) only start a winery with an investor(s), b) probably just pursue wholesale and expect less profit margin but more volume, which is fine since growing grapes and making wine is where I am happiest, and c) have a marketing/PR person if I couldn’t piggyback on preexisting wine biz connections, of which I had 0. Of course, if you have a niche - like great wine plus glorious photography, you may have a leg up . Producing too much without being able to sell it is the glory and curse of this industry.
Dusting off my memory of the discussion the first time around, on one hand, people were wondering if skyrocketing tasting prices and general costs of being in wine country (as part of a shift of tasting fees being a loss leader to attract customers into being a profit center of themselves) were driving away customers.
The counter had been that it was bad weather last winter, the 2020 smoke issue causing some wineries not to have new inventory, Covid, so maybe there wasn’t actually lower demand and it was just temporary factors.
Does @ToddFrench 's new data tend to suggest the bigger concerns might be valid? Or is it still too soon to know if it’s just hangover from the winter, the 2020 fires, covid, etc?
I didn’t watch the entire video, but was given cliff notes from someone who had - essentially it does appear that, for the current time being, more effort is being put on e-commerce sales and tasting rooms (particularly in Napa/Sonoma) are going to keep the higher fees model - tourism isn’t the focus at present
But if you are in an area that cannot sustain just foot track for tasting of your wine, a mixed use facility could generate the money needed. But yes, at that point, like HiFi, it is almost a separate business entity.
. Producing too much without being able to sell it is the glory and curse of this industry.
