Taking the cellar door to your living room

Restrictions on hospitality businesses are slowly easing, but our local cellar doors are still unable to conduct on premises tastings.

For Julie and Terry Dolle at Orange Mountain Wines, tastings and on premises retail sales make up between 80 and 90 percent of their turnover and like other wine businesses they have turned to online sales to try get through this incredibly difficult period.

But an idea created out of necessity may now end up becoming a permanent part of their business. Orange Mountain Wines have been selling tasting packs, featuring six 50ml bottles of their current releases. Like tasting fees at the cellar door, the price of the pack can then be redeemed from the purchase of wine through their website.

“It is basically taking the cellar door experience to your living room, so if you go on our website and buy one of these you can see me talking about each the wines and introducing each of the wines in the pack,” said Terry.

“Because we can't do tastings at the cellar door, we are down 300 people a week and so business is very challenging. But, what do you do? Do you sit on your hands or do you try to do something about it.”

The tasting packs have proved to be popular and Terry is now planning to offer vertical tasting packs featuring different vintages of the same variety.

And there might be a place for these packs to continue even after the Orange Mountain Wines reopen their cellar door.

“Yeah, why not? We've had a lot of great feedback,” said Julie. “I just got off the phone with a lady who had some friends over and they did the tasting over dinner and really loved it said she would definitely do another one, I think down the track long term if we could keep it running I think it would be great.”