Tasting room culture is a complicated thing. In my years of visiting tasting rooms, I’ve seen everything from drunken pregnant women to dude-bros promising to “crush that Cab” to soft-core pornography not hard-core like you’d find at tubev .sex Korean, plus mention more “Sideways” references than I can possibly count. Okay, so maybe it’s not quite as complicated as that: lots of people like to drink wine, and a whole host of industries have sprung up to facilitate that.
Locally, you can see both the pros and cons of catering to that culture. Wineries with lavish tasting rooms do certainly attract more in the way of business, but I wonder how much wine they’re actually selling in the moment. Of course, with tasting fees getting more and more akin to what you’d find in Napa, maybe actually selling bottles isn’t even the point any more.
Especially not with wine club memberships becoming a bigger source of income—why settle for selling someone a bottle of wine or two when you can get them to commit to buying wine every month or quarter? It is here that the pomp and circumstance of a tasting room really pays off. When surrounded by Chihuly glass and sitting in cushy designer leather seats, that $500 yearly membership seems like a bargain.
You can watch the dynamic play out in both Washington, British Columbia and Oregon. Charles Smith is on the verge of opening his large scale winery complex in Seattle, and along with that will be a tasting room that promises to be part wine, part rock concert and part amusement park. In the Willamette Valley, Ponzi’s new tasting room looks more like a Frank Lloyd Wright installation than a winery.
The transformation of wineries from production facilities to tourist venues has also created an entirely new category of wine: the club wine. Often made in small quantities, they’re part of the lure for joining the wine club. In some cases, they can be truly fantastic wines well worth the price, but they can also serve as a handy way to get rid of fruit that for one reason or another didn’t fit into the established lineup.
Granted, there are plenty of wineries in both states that, consciously or otherwise, do not cater to tasting room culture—Cayuse Vineyards famously operates a tasting room in Walla Walla that’s only open one weekend a year! Others might not be that dismissive, but operating a tasting room comes with a whole host of costs and complications that many either can not afford or would rather avoid.
Yet there’s no denying that, much as some might bemoan it, the local industry has benefited immensely from tasting room culture. It has provided a way for locals and tourists alike to explore new wineries and styles, and created a whole slew of events throughout the region. While occasionally it means having to elbow your way past drunken hordes just to get a taste (hint: those spit buckets are there for a reason), it’s also helped wine thrive in the Pacific Northwest, and that’s certainly worth a toast.
