PROFILE
Virtual tastings AND
home delivery Gwin Dylanwad Wine, a rural wine bar in Dolgellau, Wales, has turned to virtual wine tastings and home delivery, reveals owner, Dylan Rowlands. What was your business like prelockdown? My wife and I run Gwin Dylanwad Wine based in a sixteenth century building in Dolgellau, a town in rural Wales with approximately 2,700 people. Over the last 30 years we’ve run a bistro style restaurant at street level whilst developing the wine side of the business in the cellar. We were already importing wines from Europe and then six years ago we decided to change direction and take the leap to convert to a wine shop with a café and wine bar. Prelockdown we employed two full time and six to eight part time staff and operated a dine-in model with 25 – 30 seats inside and two small tables outside. How did COVID-19 affect your business? What did you change? When COVID-19 struck, we lost all our wholesale trade and we closed the café and bar. We paused for about two or three days to carefully think about what we needed to and could do as a business. Wine delivery and a courier service We decided that we would use the time to build up the wine side of the business by delivering directly to our customer base. From the second week of lockdown we were sharing our wine delivery service on social media and were taking orders online. We delivered two days a week – one day 40 miles to the south and the other day 40 miles north up to Anglesey. We would then use a courier service to reach people in other locations. All staff were furloughed straight away whilst my wife and I kept the business 34
going. We felt this was safer until we could build the business back up and then work on slowly bringing our staff back in. These were all tough decisions. Virtual wine tastings As a way of connecting with our customers, we put together mixed cases of select wines and organised virtual wine tastings on Facebook Live. We were quick off the mark to do this and worked hard on social media to promote the evenings. We took care to deliver the wine to people on time, ready for each session. During the tasting, I talked people through each wine, giving them the history and details and gave people a chance to ask questions. We sold about 50 cases and received great feedback from people taking part. For a few years now, I’ve been presenting a regular wine tasting segment on ‘S4C’, a Welsh-language TV channel, so felt comfortable running the 30-minute sessions and sharing our passion for wine. We’ve just run the fourth session and will take a short break before running more. Group wine tasting and music sessions We were also asked to run some hour-long personalised group wine tastings, where we would run a zoom call for a group of friends. We delivered all the wine to one house and the other people collected it safely. Some of our virtual wine tastings have also featured music from a local band, as well as partnering with a local restaurant who would deliver food to those involved. Our customers could enjoy their food whilst we explained our wines. That
worked really well for us, and allowed our customers to have a night out and taste of normality, while all the time safely at home.
Michelin star restaurant partnership Throughout lockdown we worked seven days a week. Each Sunday, we would partner with a local Michelin star restaurant who were offering takeaways. We set up outside the restaurant and November 2020
