Try Before You Buy?

 Wineries clearly believe in "try before you buy" (tryvertising), hence the tasting room.

Unfortunately, trying your wine requires that potential customers visit your tasting room, or attend a tasting event local to them.  But what if you could send out a sample of your wine?  Granted, it would probably only make sense for some wineries.

The 187ml bottle of wine has been around for a long time, both on airplanes and in convenient 4-packs at your supermarket, but this might be too large a sample to make sense for a sampling program (although a Dutch company is packaging four 187 ml bottles of different varietals as a tasting game).

Now a French company has 60 ml screw-capped glass tubes for wine, which might fit the bill.

Discussion over at the Open Wine Consortium seems split as to the usefulness of sampling.  The main question is whether it would give the customer an accurate taste of the wine inside.  No one mentioned legal issues related to shipping wine samples; presumably the same rules surrounding direct shipment would apply (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, etc.).

Everything written to describe your wine (reviews, tasting notes, etc.) is simply a substitute for someone actually tasting your wine for themselves.

Any wineries out there considering offering samples like this?  If not, why?  What's preventing someone from trying this experiment?

(PS - if there's a Wineside representative out there, can you give some idea of cost and other bottling factors?)

UPDATE:  Here's an interesting note from the TTB Web site:

The net contents of a wine container must be stated in metric units of measure.  Wine must be bottled in 50 ml, 100 ml, 187 ml, 375 ml, 500 ml, 750 ml, 1 L, 1.5 L, or 3 L sizes.  Containers over 3 L must be bottled in quantities of even liters.  No other sizes may be bottled.

Fortunately, Wideside has 50 ml bottles.

Comments

[el jefe]

I've not looked into any of this, but I would wonder how the mobile bottling line I use would set up for this - the fillers, the twist off cap, even the label application changes radically with that small diameter. I'd also have to figure out package artwork that complemented the artwork on our regular bottles. Not a lot of logo space on those things...

We could hand bottle of course but that's a lot of labor for such a little amount of wine.

Not saying any of this is impossible, but I suspect for a small winery we'll continue on the way we have been.

ps: It may be illegal to give these away in CA. 50ml exceeds the allowable 1 ounce sample pour and may also run afoul of other regs prohibiting winery giveaways. More lawyerly types should chime in here.