Millennials' Tasting Room Revolution
Flash back a few decades, and tastings at premiere wineries, especially in the US, were decidedly luxe affairs, oozing the New World's idea of what Old World glamour should be. Stretch limousines were employed to shuttle high-heeled glamazons and men with slicked-back hair from one gilded venue to the next. Don't even think about the cost. It went without saying that children, not to mention canines, were not welcome.
But these days, all you need is some spare change and a ride to a vineyard to taste some of the most lauded wines in the world. Older visitors may be alarmed to discover that wine tastings are not only attended by broke jeans-wearing 20-somethings, but also squalling babies and drooling dogs. To make matters worse, sips are often paired with, perish the thought, decidedly grubby activities such as yoga among the vines.
"The typical wine tasting has changed as our relationship to wine has changed," says wine trends expert Daniel Levine. "Wine became one of the first things in which many Americans became connoisseurs; now, people are connoisseurs of coffee, chocolate, kimchi."
However, these days, pinky in the air experiences (Napa) just seems too basic, Levine opines. "Everyone is documenting everything they do on Instagram and social media, and upscale wine experiences no longer have that cultural caché. It's like Las Vegas or Miami. Just too obvious."
Instead, he says, they seek out, "arcane, truly cool wine experiences" that aren't so obscure that they seem downright random. Think: critically acclaimed, Instagram-worthy setting, offbeat vibe. In other words, Oregon.
Legacy of Sideways
Sideways, a 2004 Academy Award-winning film about a neurotic wine wanker obsessed with Pinot Noir, served as a love letter not just to the California wine industry, but to the temperamental, thin-skinned, high-needs but remarkably elegant and complex varietal Pinot Noir. And Oregon grows tons of it, especially in the Willamette Valley. First planted by David Lett in 1965 at The Eyrie Vineyards, Pinot Noir now occupies 15,881 of the total 22,846 acres planted there.
"You can never manage the world around you, but a confluence of events has helped bring the Willamette Valley to the world's attention," says Eugenia Keegan, the Oregon General Manager for Jackson Family Wines, and production chief for Gran Moraine Winery, Penner-Ash, WillaKenzie and Zena Crown. "Pinot Noir had Sideways, which of course drew people here, and then as a culture we generally embraced a more healthy, laid-back lifestyle, low-alcohol wines with fruit-forward, fresh flavors. People became more interested in digging deeply into experiences and really learning something."
People also had less cash after the financial crash of 2008, and spending on travel and recreation just hasn't bounced back, especially among Millennials. Now, dropping $500 plus a night on a hotel in Napa, then dishing out triple digits on tastings seems as out of reach as a ride to the moon, but heading to Oregon (or New York, or even Pennsylvania) to stay at a cheap Airbnb seems manageable, especially when tastings start around $20 and usually come with an educational or experiential component.
"We are farmers first in Oregon, and many tastings here happen literally in people's barns and garages, and are conducted by the winemakers themselves, who walk visitors out to the vineyards, down to the cellar, let them taste from their tanks," Keegan says. Though there are also plenty of upscale-ish options: take Penner-Ash, with a wine cellar offering floor to ceiling windows looking out on the award-winning estate and an outdoor patio with views of Chehalem Valley; tastings there start at $25. Don't worry: dogs and babies are still allowed and everyone's wearing shorts or Levis, she says.
Shirley Brooks, the VP of Sales and Marketing for Elk Cove Vineyards and advisor to the Oregon Wine Board Export Committee, also believes that Oregon's relatively brief history and collaborative spirit speak to the current Zeitgeist. (Here's your 30-second summary of the Willamette Valley: David Lett essentially founded the Valley in 1965 when he planted the first Pinot Noir; by 1970, five bonded wineries had 35 acres under vine, and in the decades since it slowly but surely gained critical acclaim from critics like Hugh Johnson and awards shows like the International Wine Competition; now there are 564 wineries bottling juice from 756 vineyards).
"The original winemakers who founded the Valley may have retired, but they and their families are still very much present, and the spirit of collaboration lives on," Brooks says. "People come here because they love Pinot Noir, but they are also familiar with our reputation for making wines together, release collaborative vintages, hold educational seminars for the public, and sending visitors to each others vineyards and wineries. You don't find that anywhere else."
Sam Schmitt, VP of education at the Willamette Valley's Adelsheim Vineyard, has also found a huge uptick in interest in education, with a 30 percent increase in visitor-ship since 2016, when he and the winery put a series of reasonably priced (around $20 and up) educational seminars and hour-long hikes through the vineyards. Currently, DTC represents 50 percent of the wineries gross margin, but only 30 percent of its sales.
"If we can capture the sale directly, it makes a significant difference to our bottom line," he says.
Some Oregon wineries are so enthusiastic about DtC, they are bringing the Valley to the rest of the country with off-site ambassador programs. Willamette Valley Vineyards' wine director Christine Clair helps lead the program, which has off-site ambassadors peppered throughout the country conducting hundreds of in-home tastings every year. On-site, the winery offers one-off events like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones-themed pairings dinners, wine 101 seminars, plus, natch, a weekly Yoga in the Cellar class ($20, which includes a $10 wine credit).
Yoga is a hot commodity among the Millennial set, other buzzing wineries concur.
"Who wouldn't want to do yoga in a stunning vineyard, and then have a glass of wine after?" Suellen Tunney, retail sales director at New York's Wölffer Estate Vineyard asks rhetorically. Tunney estimates that since coming on board 11 years ago, visitor-ship to the vineyard (located in the chi-chi Hamptons) has grown 400 percent, largely due to their determination to aggressively market to Millennials.
"The Hamptons is obviously a tourist destination in and of itself, so we've made it our mission to reach out to and educate wine-lovers and newbies with fun, interactive classes and seminars," Tunney explains.
Wölffer offers standard tastings (with reservations), weekly tours and tastings in the vineyard, plus wine seminars on oenology and viticulture during the summer months. Last year, she estimates Wölffer had between 250,000-300,000 visitors. During the month of August, they have 800 plus reservations on a typical Friday night alone. The average check – which covers wine and cheese – is $60 per person, Tunney said.
Even wine regions bereft of critical acclaim, but abounding with moxie, are hopping on the experiential wine tourism bandwagon: in Pennsylvania, visits to wineries have surged 34 percent in recent years, due in part, the executive director Jennifer Eckinger, of the Pennsylvania Wines Association believes, to gee-whiz events like wine & cupcakes, murder mystery nights and you guessed it… yoga in the vineyards!
More than just consumer sentiment
The data certainly indicates a radical shift. There has been a drastic increase in tourism in the Willamette Valley, with the overall value of wine-related activity in Oregon surging past $5.6 billion, a 67 percent increase over three years, and wine tourism revenue more than doubling to $787 million, according to a study conducted by the Oregon Wine Board.
Tasting room visitations in Napa and Sonoma, meanwhile, are trending downward and have been for the past five years, according to Rob McMillan's findings in his 2019 State of the Wine Industry Report, while Oregon, New York and Virginia, with lower-priced SKUs and tasting fees, are thriving.
And without tasting room traffic, many small-to-mid-sized wineries simply can't survive, especially following the widespread consolidation of distributors. The average winery receives 42 percent of its DtC revenue from tasting room sales, and 36 percent of its sales overall from wine clubs. All told, that means 78 percent of wine sales stems from visits to the tasting room.
And while consumers' tastes have indubitably changed, local rules can have an outsize effect on visitor traffic. Take Napa.
"We are one of the oldest wineries in Napa, so rules around visitors and events are grandfathered in," explains Jim Morris, the vice president of estate management and guest relations for Charles Krug and Robert Mondavi. "But I have friends who've opened wineries in the past year who are only allowed to have 12 visitors a day."
Still, several Napa wineries, including Charles Krug, are aggressively fighting the downward trend in Napa, on several fronts.
"There are more than 1000 wineries within an hour's drive of us, and if we want to attract visitors, we have to give people what they want; these days, that's entertainment and education," Morris says, explaining that he was brought into Charles Krug a few years ago expressly to pump up visitor numbers and DtC sales, which were flagging.
After an initial uphill battle, he's now bringing in hundreds of consumers for special monthly events (comedy shows featuring regional stars year-round, film screenings in partnership with the Napa Valley Film Festival during the summer and the soon-to-launch "Really Interesting Speaker Series").
"Napa County has a reputation for being formal, and iconic; a place where you can drink fantastic, expensive wine, but where you're not going to meet the winemaker or have an immersive experience," says Morris, who previously worked at wineries in Sonoma. "Napa is Disneyland. Sonoma is frontier-land. To compete, we need to bring more of the frontier back."
Some Napa winemakers who insist they never left the frontier, credit that with their success.
"We have always focused on a DtC business, and we've always grown a huge variety of grapes on our 85 acres," Matt Moye, winemaker at Vincent Arroyo Winery, explains. "That wasn't trendy for a while, but we stayed on course, and we have been selling out on the 8000-10,000 cases we produce each year since we got started in 1982."
Vincent Arroyo is so old-school, they may be the one winemaker left in Napa who actually offers tastings if there are four or fewer imbibers… for free. Just don't tell anyone.
"We are not a fancy place, and if people find us, they were looking," Moye says. "We are in a barn, and everyone in the tasting room knows the entire business, in and out. Every tour is customized to what they want to see; vineyards, cellar, barrel room. We're an open book."
In other words, California wineries who want to play the DtC game are doing what would have been unthinkable a few years ago: following Oregon's lead.
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