Wine Tasting Kits

Hello again,
 

We picked our last grapes on Thursday just before yesterday's big rain. Even though it was a small harvest, the quality is quite good. We also finished all the winter preparation jobs in the vineyard on a timely manner. The vines are now ready to go to their 5 months sleep. We are hoping we will have a mild winter not too cold.

My wife and I noticed that we have just entered the holiday season. Holidays mean gifts, right. Most of you are familiar with our mini bottle tasting kits. We have a standard wine tasting kit which has 2 oz pours (double the amount of what we pour at the winery) of 9 different wines. This kit is more than enough for a couple to taste most of our wines in a nice red/green gift box and it sell for $60 tax included.  The tasting kits have been so popular last two years so I need to tell you its story.

When Covid hit in March 2020, the government forced wineries to shut down wine tastings like many other businesses. They let us work in the production and online sales only. This led us with other Ontario wineries to loose all instore business, all restaurant sales. LCBO has never been a friend of smaller Ontario wineries so they did not order anything to us. We had only online sales channel open which was always a very small percentage of our revenue due to the nature of wine business.  I must thank all of you who ordered (or not) online and supported us during this nightmare two years.

The online orders was pouring, but there was a problem of shipment. Canada Post stopped delivering to homes and you had to pick your wines at a location which none of you wanted to do. Elif, I and our two sons took the delivery job from Niagara to Kitchener to Barrie to Whitby. We were delivering most of the orders ourselves. This was saving us from the shipping cost and created a chance to see and talk to our customers at their porch from a distance. We were delivering 2-3 days a week and each day we were going to 20-25 addressess. I learned every street in Toronto, took elevators to 28th floor and knocked so many doors. 

These online sales were helping to pay our employees, bills and taxes but we were still missing one thing; wine tastings. We were continuously bottling new wines and we thought that we must find a way to present these to your consideration. In the summer of 2020, I started investigating sample size packaging for wines. There were vails from Europe or plastic pouches. My sons did not like both and suggested to use mini liquor bottles like the ones in hotel minibars. These food grade PE bottles have been used by distilleries for years for whisky, vodka packaging but we have not seen any example for wines. After a short investigation I found 10,000 empty bottles at a distillery and purchased them. Since all of our wines were previously bottled in 750 ml bottles, we had to open them and pour into 50 ml small bottles carefully without much oxygen intake. My wife Elif mastered this with a small pump. 

We thought that this idea would be small scale and temporary. But with the start of 2020 Christmas, the orders exploded. We were falling behind orders even all of us working on mini bottling. We imported 50,000 mini bottles from the US in a few months as the orders continued to increase in January, February. We were getting very large orders from big corporations for their staff virtual meetings. Their schedule was to talk one hour business matters and the second hour for wine tasting. I was invited to lead the wine tasting for at least 60-70 events, some groups were as large as 228 people covering all 10 provinces. The corporation was placing the order to us with an excel file of addresses to be shipped, we were shipping these kits to each address individually. Sometimes they were shipping us some food items, gifts to be included in each box.

When we look at our financials at the end of 2021, this was 25% of our revenue which was nonexistent before. We also helped many fellow Ontario wineries by supplying our empty bottles, bottle filler to craete theirs.

This new wine tasting concept has so many merits;

- You do not have to drive all the way to Niagara for tastings
- You do not have a time or designated driver constraint while tasting at home with your food pairing
- You can do a virtual wine tasting with your family&friends far away
- For corporations, no liability for intoxication&driving of their employees
- If you do the same amount of wine tasting at a winery it will cost at least 2-3 times more 

In September 2022, Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) provided a non-repayable contribution of $60,000, so we could  invest in automatic bottling and the packaging of our wine tasting kits. We invested in automatic mini bottle filling machine, argon gassing, label printer and applicator. Now we can bottle 20 times faster and with the help of argon sparging, shelf life of mini bottles has gone up to 4-6 months.

With this new setup we are offering a free wine tasting kit ($60 value) with wine purchases of $500 or more until December 31, 2022. We will automatically add this gift to your instore or online orders.

Have a nice weekend.

Adnan icel
Owner&Winemaker