Having spent my teens through my early thirties in the music business, I can't help but compare our Saturday wine tastings to show biz.
Much as a good restaurant does every day, there is a lot of prep work to be done: we select a theme for the tasting, then we promote it through our website, e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, flyers and word-of-mouth, choose the wines to be poured, determine the purpose of the tasting, place the wines in the order that shows them at their most favorable, prepare the accompanying meats, breads and cheeses, type up the tasting sheets, set up the tables, extract the corks and be "on" for three hours, ready to lead, teach, inform, explain and answer questions.
Most important is to make each tasting event compelling. It's one thing to say, "here are our Chardonnays," and another to focus on Chardonnays that'll expand your concept of what certain exceptional Chardonnays can do for you. Like make your next chicken or fish dinner exceptional.
This year our Saturday afternoon tastings have provided thrills for our customers in ways nobody, including us, could have anticipated. Having the Grilled Cheese truck outside, not one Saturday but two, doubled the attendance of our tastings while providing a festival atmosphere in and out of our store. And it gave a special significance to the wines being poured.
If you regularly attended our Saturday afternoon tastings you would have experienced sparkling wines and Spanish wines with grilled cheese sandwiches. On another Saturday you would have sampled two types of chili along with wines that could stand up to them. Canter's Deli truck parked outside one Saturday and we featured a thrilling lineup of 2009 Beaujolais inside, a great choice for pastrami sandwiches. In June our annual Rose Fest was held with rotisserie lamb, potatoes, carrots and freshly made aioli. You could test south-of-France wine with south-of-France food.
The end of September brought chef Virginio Picazo to The Wine Country to make paella outside our back door while Ronnie made a red and white Sangria and provided us with other Spanish wines selected to taste great with paella.
One of our customers asked me, "How are you going to top that paella?" Well, the next week Samantha Dugan selected ten fantastic cheeses from around the world and ten perfect wines with those cheeses for a master class in pairing and cheese selection and presentation.
And our amazing Saturday events keep coming.
On October 29 we'll bring in bushels of raw oysters and we'll offer some of the most vibrant, thrilling white wines to wash them down with. November 19, we'll cook up some turkey, dressing, yams and cranberries to test out our finest German Rieslings for Thanksgiving. And our last Saturday tasting of the year will feature our staff's selections for 2011's WINES OF THE YEAR!
What is our aim in presenting this wide array of wines year in and year out? It's to provide our customers the opportunity not only to sample wines they might not sample on their own, but to provide a context in which they can enjoy them once they get our wines home.
You see, going to wine tastings is a good way to learn about wine and to determine which wines please you, but tastings only tell half the story. The more important lessons will be learned at home. How are you going to experience your wine? At an outdoor picnic, snuggled cozily by the fireplace, with a meatloaf, burger or fried chicken, on a weekday, at a special dinner with friends, over a holiday celebration, or slurping down oysters? Will your favorite sipping wine still be your favorite with Thai food? With sweet barbecue sauce? With marinara sauce? With dessert?
These are questions few wine outlets concern themselves with, but we obsess over. And our Saturday wine tastings help our customers learn what will work for them.
All for just $20 per person.
4 comments:
Too funny Randy. I just retold the preparing for the cheese event story on my blog and then I come here and that last sentence, "All for only $20" seems even more powerful now.
What a great way to conduct tastings! Usually you're lucky to get some stake crackers. :)
I recommend everyone who loves wine and cheese read Samantha's blog post describing her process and her results at www.sansdosage.blogspot.com. The cheese descriptions alone make me want to dive into our cheese case and start carting them home.
Kovas:
Thanks for the comment. You're right about most wine tastings offering wine and the most minimal food offerings. In the real world--not the fantasy world of the wine shop--people drink wine in a number of ways, but historically at the table. That means we drink our wines with the foods we eat, sometimes successfully, sometimes with a disappointing result. That's why we try to weave different foods into our tastings from time to time. We want to give our customers a better idea of how their wine selections will perform when they get them home.
this looks like a real delicious sauce, maybe I can prepare it and add it to my special meatballs recipe.
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