The.  Season.  Is.  Here.  True, each sales channel in our business has a unique seasonality to it.  Wholesale is busiest for us during the summer months and leading up to the holidays.  Wine club ramps up each quarter, when we have a selection going out to members.  Internet sales are also strongest during the holidays and party seasons.  Our tasting rooms’ seasonality is the one we pay attention to the most though, as tasting room sales represent nearly 50% of our revenues each year.  As common sense would dictate, our tasting rooms’ busy months directly correlate to the weather.  Warm, sunny days – especially in early spring and fall when it’s not quite hot enough to go to the beach – are our bread & butter.  So essentially, now.  It’s here.  Visitor traffic has significantly picked up in the past few weeks and will peak in September-October when there’s arguably no better time to grab a glass of wine and a seat on our patio and take in the sprawling, peaceful farm views.

Behind the scenes, the onset of the “on season” means a whole lotta prep work has happened (and is still happening) to get us ready, and that’s what I’ll focus on for this post.

You might assume after 24 years in business that we have this whole tasting room thing down pat.  That we’d know exactly what to expect, what to offer and how to offer it.  The truth is, every year presents a new learning experience – a new set of challenges, opportunities, trials, successes and sometimes some failures.

Last year we re-branded and redesigned our Mattituck tasting room space and crowned it the official home of our Bridge Lane series.  We invested in a sizeable renovation of the interior space, re-did all of the signage and put a ton of effort into announcing, building awareness for and driving traffic to the “new” tasting room.  Although praised by the press and many of our guests, the transition wasn’t flawless and sales were flat over the year before.  We knew success and ROI wasn’t going to come overnight.  Like starting a new business, consumers needed time to rediscover (and spread the word) about the new space.  Luckily, sales figures so far this year indicate that they’ve started to do just that.  Q1 sales were up nearly 100% over last year!  We took a chance, invested in a risky rebrand and almost a year later, it seems to be paying off.

This year, then, will be all about finding ways to sustain this newfound momentum and growth.  The challenge of the rebrand is over, but now there’s opportunity to capitalize on the groundwork that’s been laid.  What, then, is our plan?  Answer: new, unique traffic driving events that engage not only consumers but the larger community.  In April, we introduced a pop-up shop series.  Each Saturday during the month, we hosted a different local purveyor of handmade goods or foods.  They “popped up” in our space and offered samples and items for purchase.  They promoted us and we promoted them, and we all benefited from increased awareness and sales.  In June, we’re introducing the first ever North Fork Rosé Crawl.  To celebrate National Rosé Day and the amazing popularity of the rosé wine category, we’ve partnered with 3 other wineries to offer an all-day “crawl,” with guests being encourage to visit each winery, sample their rosés for free and take advantage of other fun rosé-related activities and offers.  The other wineries will promote us, we’ll promote them – and hopefully it’ll be the first of many successful annual rosé crawls. Fall and winter events are planned as well and will be announced later in the year.

While the pop-up series proved highly successful and the Bridge Lane Tasting Room is off to a great start this year, I’m not making any predictions just yet, and we’re not resting on our laurels.  You don’t open your doors, see some positive results and then sit back and hope things continue to go well.  We hustle, reinvest, look to innovate, look to constantly improve and at the end of the year, hope all of the hard work has paid off.  Can’t stop, won’t stop!

Meanwhile, on Oregon Road, our Lieb Cellars Tasting Room saw double digit sales growth last year.  Traffic, event attendance, on-site consumption and “to go” bottle sales were all up.  The largest driver of the growth, though, was a set of 5 “big hit” one-day warehouse sales, where we discounted hundreds of cases of overstock wine (which had been stockpiled over the years by previous management) up to 60% to clear it out.  These flash sales achieved the objective of moving out excess inventory and boosting revenue but did little for our overall financial health outside of recouping sunk costs, since sale prices and margins were so low.

So the challenge this year, then, is to continue to show sales growth at our Lieb Cellars Tasting Room without the “big hit” warehouse sales, now that our inventory is current and we don’t have old stuff to clear out.  What’s the plan?  Answer: an improved overall customer experience.  Sounds like a no brainer, I know.  But the thinking behind it is this.  While the Bridge Lane Tasting Room has more space, a large lawn area and is better suited to events and bigger crowds, space and parking at Lieb Cellars Tasting Room is tight. To boost sales, we don’t necessarily want to drive more traffic, we need simply to attract a higher caliber clientele and provide a better experience for them once they’re here.  More customers will simply cause over-crowding and frustration for staff and guests.  Better customers, on the other hand, will mean more serious, engaged guests and a more intimate atmosphere.

As such, we’ve instituted a couple of new policies and offerings to achieve this objective.  One is no outside food.  We offer an extensive cheese & snack menu, and often feature food trucks on weekends, so allowing customers to carry in coolers, lay out big spreads and make a mess in our small space didn’t make sense.  The next is table service.  Rather than asking customers to wait in line at the bar to be served, we’re now seating them and bringing the wine to them.  While this will take some getting used to by our regulars, and requires additional staffing, it’s being met with overwhelmingly positive feedback thus far.  It allows our staff to better personally connect with each guest and affords them the time to educate, answer questions and to show how truly passionate they are about our company and our wines.  Lastly, we’re continuing our policy of not allowing limos or buses.  While we can accommodate groups up to 10 (with a reservation) coming in cars, we simply don’t have the parking or seated space to properly serve groups larger than that.  At Bridge Lane – yes!  At Lieb, it’s just not practical.  And ultimately, we believe that a higher-quality, more intimate experience for a smaller number of guests is the right model at Lieb…for us and for you.

Outside of service improvements, we’ve also decided to invest in a retractable awning that will roll out and cover our front patio during particularly sunny or rainy days.  Umbrellas were flying away last year and shade cloths proved fairly useless, so this year, it was time to invest in a permanent weather solution – so that our guests can enjoy our patio and outstanding farm views more days out of the year.  The frame is being installed in the next few weeks and we’re hoping the awning will go up before the 4^th of July.

24 years in business and still so much to do, so much to improve and so much to look forward to.  No business is perfect and because of that – there’s always room for improvement.  We certainly subscribe to that philosophy and won’t ever stop seeking to improve, innovate, respond to market demands, to meet customer expectations and to grow.

We’re excited about this season and hope you are, too.

Here’s to 2016!

Cheers!

Ami Opisso

General Manager & Certified Sommelier, Lieb Cellars