Retail: Off-Premise
SAFE TO TASTE How retailers are navigating in-store tastings during the pandemic. BY SAM SLAUGHTER
Before COVID-19, no one would think twice about walking into a liquor store and seeing a vendor standing behind a table with products on display for tasting. Not only did these tastings give consumers a chance to try a product before they committed to buying, it also gave a face (and a backstory) to the product. For many, this knowledge of the product—how it was aged or for how long, the breakdown of a specific blend, etc.—could be just as important to the purchasing process as what it tasted like. These tastings, though, like everything else, came to a screeching halt in the spring of 2020. And while liquor stores were deemed
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essential, many still closed—or in some cases closed, opened and reclosed due to spikes in cases—so it has only been in the last few months that off-premise managers have had to grapple with whether or not to host tastings in-store. For some, like Tom Agnes, liquor operations manager for the city of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, having to close earlier this year posed a bit of a problem when it came to in-store events. “We had a brand new store open on March 2 this year and we closed two weeks later due to COVID,” says Agnes. “I had already scheduled two weeks of grand opening events
including tastings, celebrity events, all this kind of stuff. All those got cancelled. We haven’t had a tasting since then.” Before closure, Agnes says they would usually have tastings on Fridays and Saturdays, with a few hundred people coming through the doors in that time. Timothy Van Riper, former tasting room manager for Westport Whiskey & Wine in Louisville, Kentucky, experienced a similar thing, though to an even greater extent. “We’ve closed and opened many times. We’ve been closed (again) since October 23 because of the rise in cases in the area,” he says. In the times they’ve been open, though, Van
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