Delivering California Wine Country to Your Door
When the pandemic hit in March 2020 and it became evident that people weren’t going to be allowed to visit wineries, the wine industry had to figure out how to survive in this climate. Steve Olson, one of the owners of ONX Winery told his employees “You are not going to lose your job. You need to figure out how to sell wine and keep us going.” So, they sat around and talked and brainstormed different ideas. Out of this discussion and a few bottles of wine, the idea of bringing the wine tasting experience to people’s homes was born.
A sample of the personalized winetasting box
It started out with a small cardboard box, straw, and 6 little bottles (think the size of individual vodka or alcohol bottles) shipped to people’s homes and tasted and discussed the wines with a winery staff member via Zoom. Sarah Farley, ONX at Home Director, explained the evolution of this new tasting paradigm. “It didn’t make sense to ship full bottles for this, so we created the small bottle format. This way people could taste and if they wanted to buy full bottles from us, we’d ship them. We started doing tastings at home and quickly progressed to tastings in businesses.” A fresh twist on team building, for sure.
“People even do this with friends and family all around the country. Some do winetasting birthday parties,” Sarah said. “We also have cheese at home and blending at home.”
This is the future of winetasting. “We can get to so many more people with this model. People from Pennsylvania or Minnesota don’t have to travel here to taste our wines,” Sarah said.
“We came up with the tagline, ‘the more you do the more you do’ because the more tastings we hosted the more people were finding out about them, attending them, and then hosting their own,” Farley said. “It was a ripple effect.”
