More time at a winery = fewer overall winery visits
There has been a lot of hand-wringing of late about why tasting room visitation is down. Overlooked, however, is a very simple math problem that the industry itself created.
Let me back up. In years gone by, people bellied up to the tasting room bar, tried a flight of wines, decided if they wanted to buy wine or join the club, and left.
Today, the focus is all on “the experience.” People are encouraged to spend an extended amount of time at a winery, and they do.
There have been a number of follow-ons. Many wineries now have seated tastings. Wine is sold by the glass and by the bottle. There is food, sometimes even a full menu. Wineries used to want customers to come in a couple of times a year for wine releases. Now, some would like them to come in a couple times a month.
To accomplish this, wineries have added experiences that are wine adjacent. There are game nights, trivia nights, open mics, musical acts, wreath-making classes, and more. The only limit is the imagination of the person in charge. The result has been what I’ve referred to as the tasting room arms race.
In the Pacific Northwest, these changes have long been underway, as wineries became more established and had better facilities. However, the pandemic turbo-charged this evolution. People had to be seated, spaced out, and there to be some semblance of food.
Guess what? Consumers liked it, and many wineries did too.
On the plus side of experience-based tastings, every winery I have spoken with over the last five years has said that their average sale-per-customer is up. This makes sense. People spend more time, have a better experience, and are more likely to buy wine and join the wine club.
However, many have also told me that visitation is down. In cases, it is down dramatically.
Why? Well, there could be myriad reasons. However, one stupid-obvious reason is that wine lovers aren’t visiting as many tasting rooms because they are staying at tasting rooms longer due to experience-based tastings.
Historically, many wine lovers would stop at a couple of tasting rooms in the morning, have lunch somewhere, and then go to a couple more tasting rooms in the afternoon before heading home. Now, people are much more likely to visit one, maybe two tasting rooms in a day. (Major release weekends remain an exception.)
Instead of spending 30-45 minutes at a winery, they are spending an hour and a half to two hours. They aren’t leaving to get food. They are eating at the winery. Afterwards, feeling like they’ve already had a full excursion, they head home.
Now let’s get back to that math problem. If 100 people visit four tasting rooms a day, that’s 400 visits. Now imagine those same people only go to one tasting room a day. That’s three hundred fewer visits!
The implications are profound. There are far fewer people coming through the door, less wine sold, and fewer wine club signups. It begs the question, has focusing so much on “the experience” helped the wine industry or, inadvertently, hurt it?
Regardless of the answer, one thing is clear. There’s no going back now. Most consumers are not going to return to visiting 4-5 tasting rooms a day. Even if they wanted to, many wineries are no longer set up to accommodate them that way.
So, if the same group of people is no longer visiting as many tasting rooms in a day, how can wineries compensate? The only way is to find a different group of people. That is, to grow the customer base.
It’s a simple math problem. Of course, solving it is easier said than done.
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There’s a major factor at play in incentivizing people to slow down – safety.
It’s our moral and legal obligation to serve alcohol safely. If you multiply six 1.5-ounce pours in a ~20 minute “belly up to the bar” tasting by 4-5 wineries in an afternoon, you’re likely not going to operate a motor vehicle safely – even if you’re spitting. In a general sense 20+ years ago, there weren’t enough wineries around to realistically hit 4-5 in an afternoon. Now that’s not the case, so collectively, slowing guests down makes sense.
Here on Red Mountain, we don’t have reliable Uber/Lyft service, nor are the wineries spaced to accommodate walking. We obviously love it when guests plan for a DD and/or hire a driving service (and recommend several on our “Plan Your Visit” itinerary builder).
JJ, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for people slowing down and spending more time at wineries. I think that there are a lot of positive things to come out of it, including those you mention. However, there are, unintentionally, some less positive ones as well.
Like I wrote in the article, there’s no going back now anyway, so it’s more a question of how to try to expand the group of people visiting to keep tasting rooms viable.
Sean, I get the math problem, but I dispute that total sales from top visits would be less aggregate – I don’t have the data, but it would be counter intuitive to me that this is causing wineries to have less sales. I used to visit more than two wineries a day but it doesn’t mean my budget grew exponentially because of that. As a matter of fact, I think it was a lot easier to sneak out a tasting where I wasn’t fond of the wines in a belly up to the bar scenario, than it would be today.
That said, I agree that all wineries or any business for that matter need to find new/more customer to be successful and that good beyond having a great experience (that was a great step for in person visits). The vast majority of wine buyers I the US never visit a wine region so finding new ways to identify these new buyers where they live is essential.