Ever wonder what your visitors think about your business or the impressions made by your employees behind the tasting room counter?
The staff you have behind the tasting bar is essentially the face of your winery. Therefore, it is important they are able to represent your winery in a way that is beneficial to the winery and useful to your customer. Though it may be difficult to find employees willing to work the long hours needed, it is not hard to train the people once you find them. Training is key.
Happy Staff = Happy Customers = Sales
At the winery where I work, we have one full time tasting room employee that works during the week. We also have a large part time weekend crew and most of them have other jobs outside of their winery position. For your part time staff bonuses come not only from a paycheck, but also from an internal reward, from believing in your winery and the products you craft. Of course this is enhanced when given a pleasant work environment.
Consequently your part time work-force takes pride in their jobs and is eager to take good care of your customers. That translates into employees that work hard for your winery while at work but also praise the winery when they are away. Take home message: when employees enjoy their job and are allowed to have fun the customers will too and that likely equates to increased sales.
Hire a Wine Novice?
Depending on the number of people applying to work at your winery you may need to hire a person that has no personal history with wine. Some might think this would be a problem, but I believe that it is not. From my perspective, I think it is more important that the person is consumer-focused, has a positive attitude, and is willing and able to learn. I find it is more difficult to teach new employees excellent people skills; conversely, I find it is relatively easy to teach them about our wines and wine service and to be able to effectively communicate that to our customers.
I believe the most important part of my job is to make the customer feel welcome. No amount of knowledge about wine can overcome an inability to provide good service. Promptly acknowledging a customer entering your tasting room, inviting them in and offering a tasting, and if time and activity allows, show them around the winery goes far in building a solid relationship. It becomes a personal experience rather than a scripted, impersonal winery stop.
Tasting Room Education
My experience has been that most of the customers have similar questions. The questions are focused on how to taste a wine and basic questions about growing grapes and the wine making process. The essential knowledge needed to be an effective tasting room attendant can be covered in a couple of hours of training.
I suggest beginning with the very basics in the tasting process. Take new and returning employees through a sensory analysis progression and describe what is going on during each step of the process, keeping in mind employees will have to relate this same sort of information to the public soon.
- Visual Analysis: Explain what is going on during the visual inspection (Editor’s Note: Premium Winedustry subscribers have access to a Winesmarts™ Sensory Descriptive Analysis worksheet). Take time to describe what an intensely colored red wine might mean and dark golden colored white wine might indicate.
- Aromatic Analysis: Explain the process of aromatic sensory analysis by bringing out a standard wine (non-doctored) and five other similar wines that have added aromatic compounds (e.g, dosed with pineapple or oak) so they can learn to detect a single compound in a wine, one at a time. Spend time explaining why one swirls the wine in a glass, demonstrating how to “sniff” a wine, and why someone would do this.
- Palate Analysis: Explain the tasting process and the interrelationship between smelling and tasting. Remind staff of the importance of using non-scented detergents and hand soaps so visitors get the best representation of your wines. Help your staff, through repeated tastings, to differentiate your wines – to be able to explain the sensory differences between, for example, a Marquette, Chambourcin and Norton.
By the end of your training all employees should be able to describe each of the tasting steps, know the reason one does it, and to be able to briefly describe varietal characteristics of each wine grape you use.
Employees ought to have rudimentary knowledge about what grapes can you grow in your area, harvest times, where do you plant and why.
As far as the wine making process goes, employees should be able to tell the customers the basic process from when you pick the grapes to when you bottle the wine. Additionally, some basic knowledge about primary fermentation, secondary fermentation, ageing, when and what is oaked, alcohol content, residual sugar, how wineries make sweet wines sweet.
Know Your Wines!
Your employees should have a deep understanding of all of the wines you sell. It’s not enough to say to a customer: “do you like white wine” and follow the tasting sheet notes. A well-trained employee ought to have an advanced understanding of your wines that goes beyond the tasting sheet. That means helping your staff develop their own way of talking about your wines – have them interpret the wine for you while you pretend to be the customer.
When you teach your employees about the sensory analysis process, they will have their own interpretations of the wine. They may smell or taste things that aren’t on the tasting sheet. That is great as long as they are accurate! When a deeper dialog between your staff and your customer is allowed to emerge good things happen – the beginnings of a relationship is forged, goodwill is established and I am convinced word of mouth and greater sales are accomplished.
I have gotten into very interesting conversations about what a wine tastes like with customers and those kinds of interactions create a great experience for them and me. Your employees should also be able to direct the customer towards the wine they will like best.
In my experience you have about three tastes to get close to what the customer it looking for before they become uninterested. This is an art that is learned over time, but at the winery where I work, we have a basic way of narrowing it down. We have a “go to” wine to start with if the customer isn’t sure where to start. It is a nice, easy to drink semi-sweet white wine. The response from tasting that wine will tell us where to go next. Narrowing the selections down for the customer helps the customer enjoy the experience a little more as well as saving the winery wine from wasted samples.
Summing Up
There is no way every tasting room employee will know everything about wine. Eventually there will come a time where someone will ask a question that an employee doesn’t have an answer. At this point it is very important for staff to say something like, “I don’t know but I can ask the wine maker or the owner”.
Training winery staff is essential to the long-term success of your winery business and requires a long-term commitment. Develop training materials, make time for training days during the busy season to exchange ideas and change approaches, and when time allows consider hiring a winery consultant to come in and conduct an on-site training.
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You can find Greg Ratliff working in the tasting room and during special events at Fireside Winery in Marengo, Iowa.
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