Virtual tastings, online sales: Here’s how SLO County wineries are adapting to coronavirus
On a normal Friday, Broken Earth Winery could have easily hosted local power-folk duo Bear Market Riot for a concert at the winery’s Paso Robles headquarters.
In a pre-coronavirus world, the winery had very little trouble hosting these concerts at its still relatively new tasting room and restaurant on Ramada Drive. People would flock to see the local talent, eat with their friends and maybe even sample a few glasses of wine.
But that was before the COVID-19 pandemic sent San Luis Obispo County’s wineries into a tailspin.
Instead, Bear Market Riot performed live from a living room via Facebook on Friday, playing for dozens of viewers who themselves were confined to their homes.
“Everybody that’s saying thanks to us, the thanks all goes to Broken Earth for keeping this thing going in these weird times,” Nick Motil, one half of the music duo, said at the start of the performance.
The hosted Facebook live concert is one of many pivots that local wineries have made in recent days in the face of an unprecedented global pandemic.
“We get new information it seems like every hour,” Broken Earth Winery director of hospitality Elise Herrera joked March 18, noting that the winery had been in a mad dash to decide how it would respond to orders for bars and wineries to close and restaurants to reduce their occupancy by half.
Less than an hour before Herrera spoke with The Tribune that day, the rules had changed yet again — now San Luis Obispo County was under a shelter-at-home order, starting at 5 p.m. March 19.
This meant no tasting rooms. No dining rooms in restaurants. Definitely no in-person concerts.
“We’re taking everything day by day,” Herrera said. “It’s just trying to deal.”
SLO County coronavirus rules change daily
Every time they set new plans in place the past two weeks, San Luis Obispo County wineries were almost immediately required to adjust.
Case in point? The Tribune spoke with general manager Jason Haas of Tablas Creek Vineyard on March 13, the day after he made the difficult decision to stop allowing walk-in tastings at the Paso Robles winery. He also decided to limit tasting group sizes so that six feet could be kept between all patrons in the tasting room at a time.
At that point, there were no local COVID-19 cases, and Haas said that though he knew the new rules would limit business, he also knew it was the right thing to do to help curb a local outbreak.
By March 16, all tasting rooms in the county were closing, including Tablas Creek.
“We’ll be closing our tasting room immediately,” Haas wrote in a tweet that day. “Wine orders, wine club, etc. are still fine ... but I strongly suggest that anyone who wants to order wine from a winery do so in the next week. Non-essential businesses could be closed down any time.”
As of Monday, Tablas Creek is still accepting and delivery wine orders online. Haas has not responded to follow-up Tribune requests for comment since March 13.
What about Broken Earth Winery? Because it has a restaurant, at least some of the winery’s usual operations are allowed to continue under the shelter-at-home order.
The restaurant will keep making food. Staffers will just deliver it rather than handing it off to customers on the actual premises, Herrera said.
“Which is great because a lot of people don’t have access to food or ability to cook at home right now,” she added. “That’s a really nice thing we’ve been able to do.”
It’s also given winery’s owner some wiggle room in keeping workers on and finding “creative ways to keep everyone having hours,” and continue to pay them wages they need, Herrera said.
Spring wine shipments and virtual tastings
Other San Luis Obispo County wineries haven’t been so lucky.
“Basically our business is shut down,” said Bob Tillman, owner of Alta Colina Wine in Paso Robles.
Tillman and his daughter Maggie Tillman, the winery’s communications director, spoke with The Tribune on March 18, prior to the announcement of state and county stay-at-home orders.
On that day, Bob Tillman described his experience in recent weeks as driving a sports car really fast, before suddenly plummeting off a cliff. Or, according to Maggie Tillman, it’s “like driving a sports car going 120 mph and then it hits a really big puddle, and we don’t know how deep the puddle is.”
Bob Tillman said business had been speeding along — booming even — at the small Adelaida Road winery, until the coronavirus epidemic hit locally and the bottom dropped out of the business.
“We went quiet, basically,” he said.
Though losing its tasting room, and the face-to-face contact that came with it, was a hit to their business, Maggie Tillman said it’s also been an opportunity for a lot of creativity.
Take, for example, the winery’s spring shipment.
Normally it would take about four weeks for the winery to package and send out its spring shipment of wines to club members, including a late March launch party to sample some of the new offerings.
With coronavirus cases reported in San Luis Obispo County and nobody allowed out for a party, Maggie said the winery has decided to compress that schedule to just one week, and get the wines to members as soon as possible.
As for that party?
“To encourage people to stay home and stay safe, we’re going to move that to a virtual tasting,” Maggie Tillman said. “They’ll have the wines in hand at that point.”
Broken Earth Winery has also announced plans for virtual wine tasting events that would give people the experience of being at the winery and learning more about its offerings.
Meanwhile Alta Colina has launched a social media giveaway for a stay at its Trailer Pond, a small vintage trailer park nestled in the middle of its vineyards.
The giveaway asks entrants to buy a gift card to a local business anywhere in the United States and snap a picture of it. After sharing those photos to social media, they can then be entered to win a stay at the Trailer Pond. Details are available on Alta Colina’s Facebook page.
The giveaway is meant to encourage people to support local businesses, including wineries, during a time when those businesses might be struggling, Maggie Tillman said.
“We’re leaning hard on social media and trying to put some goodness out there,” she said.
Local wineries pivot to online sales
Broken Earth Winery and Alta Colina, as well as Chamisal Vineyards in Edna Valley, are leaning hard on another outlet to keep their businesses running: online sales.
Representatives at all three wineries noted that online sales are the primary way in which many San Luis Obispo County residents can continue to support their businesses.
“As of right now everyone is still purchasing wine,” Chamisal director of consumer sales Andrea De Palo told The Tribune on Monday. “We are getting a bunch of phone calls. I think the good thing is people are understanding the shelter in place and trying to make the most of it and enjoy their favorite wine at home.”
Like its Paso Robles counterparts, the past few weeks have been similarly chaotic for Chamisal, De Palo said.
At first, the San Luis Obispo winery decided to move to curbside pickups for residents to buy wines, but then once the shelter-at-home orders came out, it chose to close the tasting room all together and focus on online sales, she said.
Luckily, Chamisal had already begun focusing more of its efforts on the online market in recent months, she added, so it was in some ways ready to make the switch once coronavirus started complicating things.
Some of Chamisal’s wines are also available in grocery stores — which are essential businesses and allowed to stay open during the shelter-at-home closures — meaning people still have relatively easy access to their favorite wines, De Palo said.
The Edna Valley winery has also had to cancel or postpone private events scheduled for its San Luis Obispo property, and it’s eyeing future events closely to decide if and when those might need to be canceled as well.
“I think our biggest thing is we’re here to help in any way we can,” De Palo said. “Most of us are just looking for this to pass so we can get back together and enjoy a glass of wine in person.”
“Tomorrow it could be a totally different day and a whole different situation,” she added. “We are just trying to adjust.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2020 at 12:13 PM.
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