If You Can’t Bring Americans to the Winery, Bring the Tasting Room to Them

Urban tasting rooms tap into local foot traffic and help build customer relationships without requiring costly long-distance travel. Satellite locations as well educate guests, offer distinct urban experiences, and entice tourists to visit distant primary vineyards in the future.

Tropez for vacation , but for the vast majority of Americans, flying anywhere this summer is a pricey undertaking. Per to a recent travel inflation report , airfare costs have grew by 26.7% over the past year, primarily due to the steep rate increases in jet fuel earlier this spring.

Those rising fares impact consumer appetite for international as well as domestic travel, the latter of which has real implications for the wine trade, which relies heavily on traffic to wineries and tasting rooms , especially during the summer. We believe that there are a lot of people who are interested in exploring and learning about California wine, but might not have the time, money, and resources to travel across the country to experience it.

Allison Owen, president and founder of Turks Head While some wineries have attempted to attract visitors by lowering tasting room costs (which the same report points to has had mixed success), others are embracing a different, albeit more dramatic, alternative: first day tasting rooms tens or even hundreds of miles away from the vineyard. “There is an opportunity by reaching the customer where they live. There aren’t dominant strategies that are pointing in a proven path, but they are emerging,” explains Rob McMillan, EVP & Founder of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Wine Division, in the firm’s direct-to-consumer annual report .

Per to Chris Brockaway, founder of Broc Cellars ,, the biggest benefit of running a tasting room in Berkeley, rather than in the bucolic California vineyards he sources from, is capitalizing on all of the foot traffic in the Bay Area. “If someone is visiting San Francisco, but not going to wine country, they can still visit us,” he explains. While visitors benefit from being able to hop from one to another on bike or foot, the marketplace is extremely saturated. Hosting Away from Home When the vineyard is out of sight, the role of tasting room workforce becomes especially critical.

They are responsible for painting a vivid picture of the wine’s terroir from hundreds of miles away. “Location, climate. Soil type are hard to understand while in an urban setting, so we do group trips up to the vineyard multiple times per year to stay or camp overnight,” explains Brockaway, whose team sources Broc Cellars’ grapes from all over the state. He states that the trip gives tasting room staff key color about the wines, which they can then pass on to visitors. For example, everybody remembers that Brachetto is typically the first varietal to come in from Fox Hill every year, as the team goes up to pick it together.

Ultimately, tasting rooms located away from vineyards serve as a test of more than just the tasting room staff’s education—it challenges the wine’s ability to compel drinkers to both travel even further, and perhaps more importantly, embrace where they are. We are able to introduce guests to things they didn’t even know they were missing, and act as a concierge for them when they decide they are ready to make the trip to southern Oregon.

Meg Ordaz, director of consumer sales at Troon “Our locations are very distinct from each other; in the Applegate Valley, we are out on the farm, a solid 20 to 25 minutes away from town,” says Ordaz. “It is beautiful, peaceful, and romantic… At our location in McMinnville, we are in the middle of a downtown area that is vibrant and bustling. We have lodging and restaurant partners just down the block.

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