Was talking with Tegan Passalacqua today and he told me that distributors are saying nobody is ordering wine. Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Licquor Stores… have been slow and not restocking.
Traffic through the Valley didn’t seem any different today.
Not surprised HdR was postponed, was surprised by the recent email stating it was still on.
-Al
Good article from the SF Chronicle’s wine writer on this subject:
On a personal note, bummed Ridge is cancelling it’s Monte Bello Assemblage event, but I get why they’re doing it.
I have a week long trip planned to Napa and Sonoma in late October. I plan to make that trip, god willing. I also plan to be a good consumer and buy stuff. Hope this is all a bad nightmare by then.
I had a private tasting scheduled a group of about 60 in Redondo Beach tomorrow night that was just postponed, and I was supposed to pour at Disneyland this weekend - and obviously that is not going to happen.
We are keeping our tasting room open for now - and will continue to do so and monitor things moving forward.
Cheers
I don’t know if it’s the same up there but I just had a conversation with a store owner a few minutes ago and I asked him if he was going out of business or just couldn’t get stock. He said it was crazy but people were cleaning off the shelves. By five o’clock he’d done fifty percent more business than he usually does in a whole day. He’s getting stock but people are lining up at seven a.m. before he’s open. No water and no paper goods were in the store - he said he sold out an entire truckload.
People are weird.
around 130k deaths a year combined between influenza and opiates in the US. 40 dead in US from corona.
time to panic.
Hospitality, food service and retail have all seen a loss of business since mid January and now in March, you can definitely state it is the loss of visitors. Unfortunately, it also proves the point certain areas/businesses have dedicated themselves to visitors and not the locals. At 4 PM today, a friend seated at an outside table of a downtown restaurant, took a picture of one block. No people. One parked car. No traffic. Restaurants aren’t buying wine/liquor at the usual amounts because of the loss of business, so the distributors are also losing sales. On the plus side, if you are coming to Napa in the near future, accommodations are the cheapest they’ve been. You can get into most restaurants that normally require reservations. Retailers have better stock than before and at lower prices. There has only been one case of Corona Virus in Napa. Every business has an excess of toilet paper.
Not the only one either. I’ve gotten at least 1/2 dozen events cancelled this weekend. Most tasting rooms remain open but pickup parties etc are all being cancelled.
Sean
In the Seattle area we had a run on toilet paper and bottled water. None of this makes sense. But a friend speculated that people are reverting to earthquake preparedness. There is no indication of any concern or risk to the water supply. Toilet paper – as I understand it the virus is no worse or better on this score than the regular flu.
The concern is if supply chains are disrupted, stores can’t get deliveries, cities basically shut down, what do you really not want to run out of? Toliet paper is one of those items. Is that likely to happen? I don’t know, but we do not know what the next few weeks are going to look like. This week would have been unthinkable just two weeks ago. So it makes total sense to me to make sure you have enough on hand. (Not saying it’s right to hoard, but just to make sure you’re covered for a few weeks.)
GregT wrote:
Public transportation will also be affected but interestingly, automobile traffic also seems lighter than usual. I don’t know if that’s the actual case or not but it would make sense if people are increasingly working from home and avoiding travel that would be exclusively for pleasure. If that’s what’s happening, seems like wine country may be in for yet another hit.
In the Bay Area, freeway traffic is down and BART has 30% less passengers than earlier this year. I am sure that more people are working from home, at least for the short term. And, we have found parking in San Francisco has gone from impossible to merely difficult, which seems like another sign of less people on the roads.
Ed
I’m really hoping our newly minted tradition of heading to Willamette Valley for Memorial Day isn’t interrupted this year. But realistically we’ll be looking at well over half a million cases nationwide (or a million+ true cases) so the odds are not looking favorable.
Traveled for work this week and there was definitely a noticeable drop in people traveling. The hotel that I stayed at is usually at 90%+ occupancy and they told me they’re at 30% this week. My Uber driver at the airport told me he’d waited over 6 hours for a pick up. Restaurants in SF and the bay area have had a significant drop in business. My employer, my clients, and most of my friends employers have all implemented domestic travel bans and have encouraged (if not made mandatory) working from home for the next few weeks. This is going to be painful for everyone in travel, hospitality and F&B and i’m sure the everyone else will also feel the ripple effects in the coming months.
Same over here in Europe, traffic, hospitality, movies, parks heavily down. Concerts and other larger gatherings all postponed. I’ve got roughly 10 emails this week from wine retailers/wineries postponing/cancelling larger tasting events. People on high alert. This alertness makes me confident that not only the storm passes with less casualties but that the rebound could start as early mid/end of May. Fingers crossed.
A wise man once said retail is dead or something like that…
There’s been a massive slowdown for me the last week and a half after an outstanding February.
Not wine country–but:
It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like in my tasting room in downtown Los Olivos this weekend. There were people out and about yesterday.
SB Vintners postponed their festival, slated for early May, until October, and the Santa Barbara Culinary Experience, a celebration of food and wine honoring Julia Child, which was supposed to take place this weekend, has been postponed until next year
Not to be a bit morbid, but the World of Pinot Noir did go on as planned last weekend - probably the last major wine event to do so - and there were plenty of folks from not aournd the country but around the world. Hoping that all of these folks are fine . . .
Cheers.
Jim, I’m curious on this part. If the virus is passed via simple breathing (it is), why would gloves be needed/necessary? If one of your guests had the virus, they would’ve already infected your staff by the time it was time to clean up just by being in the same room. If your in the process of cleaning up, why not just wash your hands when done and make a point to not touch your face until you can wash your hands? I guess the gloves just seem like an unnecessary extra burden with little to no benefit.
FWIW, I may be whistling by the graveyard but I spent an hour tasting wines at Lone Madrine yesterday afternoon in Paso area.
It’s a small facility but a dozen people were there on a Thursday afternoon.
Nice wines as well.