Virtual Tastings?
 

My local ABC sent an email this morning advertising virtual tastings. No details yet on wineries. Would you be interested?

What are the mechanics? Maybe the plan is to taste 4-6 wines in a tasting. How do I get 4-6 wines at home without buying 4-6 bottles? Or am I just on Zoom pretending to taste some wine and spitting it in a bucket? If the former, that's kinda a pricey commitment would guess. I see specials where you buy in at $70-100, so maybe that might be tolerable. I might be bored enough to do this in a few more weeks but as a single drinker at home, having 4-6 open bottles might make me do something I would regret.

Details forthcoming. Surely they don’t expect you to invite a half dozen people into your home. I’m curious. But not likely interested.

I'm about to try one. One of my wine stores has a deal where you buy the six selected bottles of wine at a discount (curbside or in store pickup, or the wine store delivers for free if you're close enough) and then get the zoom meeting code for the tasting. Cost was about $100 and I anticipate that some of the wines won't be to my taste, so they'll get dumped, but there's one really interesting one that I'm happy to buy at the discount, so I don't feel too unhappy for now about the package deal.

More later.

I've seen others organized by reasonably upscale wineries in the USA where the deal is that you pay about $100 all in (including shipping) for *one* bottle of wine. I was tempted until I saw the winery's argument that this is what one would pay for a glass of wine at happy hour. Even in fancy hotel bars, I don't think I've ever seen happy hour wine offered for over $30 per glass, plus tax and tip, in the USA. IMO it's a stretch even if the bottle is shared by two people.

I've seen this pop up. I'm on the mailing list for some wineries that are tying this to their spring/summer releases (buy your spring or summer release, we'll ship it and hold a virtual tasting 7-10 days after the release closes).

Honestly I would expect this to stick for the wineries. Makes a lot of sense for the wineries with mailing lists where a fair number of their customers might not be making regular visits to the winery but appreciate getting to taste the new releases "with the winemaker"

I've seen a few of these and have a friend who has participated. The lure of a tasting for me is to try wines that are too pricey to buy without knowing if I'll like them, and to split that (discounted) price of several different bottles with maybe a dozen other people since they are small pours. If I find one I really enjoy, I don't feel bad paying a lot of money for it. Before the complete and total lock-down of Illinois, we used to do these at a couple different wine shops, maybe once a month, especially if they had a representative from the winery leading it. I think the last one we did was a Gundlach Bundschu tasting, which is a winery we always enjoy.

If I have to buy the whole bottle(s) to do the tasting, it defeats the purpose.

I’m happy to host a virtual tastings of some wines. Just grab a bottle of something and hear me ramble about a few whites and reds from select regions in the world?

My club is doing this every Thursday through its wine supplier. You get the eight selected bottles delivered on Wednesday, then the supplier offers a live tutored tasting on the Thursday, with Q&A. Each case of eight is themed. The first was 8 reds under £12, the second 8 whites under £12, this is being repeated but in the £12-20 range and we have some interesting ones coming up - eight Albarinos caught my eye, along with 8 Crus Bourgeois from 2010. I'll probably do about half of them.

This would sum up my view.

Thinking about this a little more, it might be a genius idea for a winery to sell some smaller bottles. A virtual tasting would make a lot more sense if they sold a flight of single serve bottles like the mass producers do, then hosted the tasting on Zoom or whatever. Too late to do now, as anything drinkable is already bottled. But maybe this goes on for a while, quarantines for now, but even a year or two from now travel may still be down or virtual tastings just become a thing regardless.

If a winery I liked, or wanted to try, shipped me an 8 pack of small bottles for $25-$50, I'd consider doing this, and then buying bottles of any I enjoyed. This might even open some new markets after this is all over. Listen up Napa! :)

This. One of our local beer distributors is doing a virtual tasting of Vizzy Hard Seltzer. It's not something I would normally drink, but I thought perhaps they were doing something where you could buy one of each flavor or receive small samples between designated times to take home and sample during the Zoom or whatever. I read about it, and no... You have to buy an entire case of it.

I don't know about US wine producers, but most French wine producers also sell half bottles which are much more manageable for these purposes and, if you really don't like the wine, there's much less to discard. Of course, for tasting purposes you have to realise that the wine from half bottles will mature faster.

The Champagne producers also sell wine in quarter bottles - very expensive per 100ml, but still viable for these purposes.

Quarter bottles would be perfect - splitting a generous single pour for 2 people is an appropriate tasting. We see some half bottles here, and then single serve which are mostly the mass producers. Beginning to see some in aluminum cans, but these seem to be more upstart wineries. Some canned wine has been decent and some has been completely undrinkable. In any case, I think if wineries adapted to the times by producing quarter bottles (and prorated the cost, maybe quarter bottles sell for 30% of the regular bottle), they could be opening up a whole new market both for online tastings as well as people who just want to try wines without committing to an $80 bottle.

I got a second email with a pretty extensive schedule. Now, bear in mind this is a huge chain with >150 stores, so they don’t have to get but a small fraction of customers statewide to participate for it to be worthwhile. In fact some events were capped at under 50 tasters.

Most events were wine, and some were low priced everyday $10-20 bottles. Some of what I took to be pricier products were a single bottle of wine. The one that shocked me was a Four Roses tasting where participants were expected to purchase five bottles of whiskey. I’m guessing an average price of $50, I could be high or low, so an investment of $250. You order by phone or online and do curb side pickup. But it’s not like you’re gonna invite 10 friends over to join you. To me it seems a stretch.

ETA: only four bourbons at an average of $40. You start with the $20 bottle and work your way up. Tasting limited to first 100 and I don’t see a way to pre-register. Meaning I spend $160 and am SOL if I’m #101?

That actually is kind of shocking. I like Four Roses, and I enjoy whiskey and bourbon tastings typically. But this seems like the type of thing my local Binny's (a liquor superstore with 3 or 4 locations around Chicago) would do for a price between free and $25. And I'd often buy a bottle of something I tried and liked, but not before the tasting. I guess I just don't crave (or maybe miss) human contact so much that I need to buy $160 of alcohol just to be part of a Zoom group.