Sampling Wine By Mail

The best way to sell a wine is to give someone a sample of it.  As much as I wish the Internet were a solution to everything, the fact that you can't taste a wine over the Net is inescapable.

But, here's a French winery using their Web site (alas, I don't read French) to get wine samples into the hands of potential customers by mail.  They charge about $5 (3.90 euros) for a single 60 ml sample, which isn't as good as a free pour at the tasting bar, but not unreasonable, either.   (The winery promotes their effort as a way to be greener, by keeping people out of their cars.)

Coupled with a video that leads a sample-drinker through a tasting of the wine, this isn't a bad idea.

And if you give the $5 back if they order the wine after sampling it, it shouldn't be too hard to convince people to give it a try.

The biggest obstacle for wineries (I would think), is the additional work of producing a sample-sized bottle of their wine.  Please leave a comment if you know what's involved in this.

Will this replace your tasting room?  Not yet.  

(via Serious About Wine)

Comments

[mydailywine]

I saw this article awhile back and am very interested in their creative solution.
The two challenges in the U.S. would be the additional cost to wineries of a new package and of course, our arcane wine compliance laws.

[Jared Brandt]

A French blog I read had a link to this a while back. I think it is a great idea and I like their design. Within the EU, I believe you can send wine across borders so it opens them up to a huge market. Mydailywine is right - compliance would make it nearly impossible here.

[gianpaolo]

I've found the French company that makes those little tubes. It's quite interesting, you send them your wine and they put it in those tubes that can be personalized with your logos and graphics and send them back to you. All at a cost of course, but it's a good marketing point. A bit complicated in the end if you have more than a couple of wines, because you have to buy several hundreds of those tubes per wine, but I'm thinking about it (I'm in Italy and we have no problems with wine shipments across Europe, thank God).

[el jefe]

I would love to be able to send a sample pack of say 4 wines. But for a small winery we're pretty much talking hand bottling small quantities of small containers for sampling. After I factor in all of the costs of the extra labor, packaging, compliance, etc. I might as well send 750s. Maybe someday.