Virtual tastings and home

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 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

offered people wine tastings safely whilst they waited to collect their food. They learnt about the wine we offered and what to pair with certain foods. It meant we could meet new potential customers and expand our customer base.

Moving the wine cellar and creating a food market offering

As we adapted, we moved the wine area up from the cellar into the café area on the first floor. We knew the café area would be too small to operate with appropriate social distancing, so wanted to put it to better use. When we could, we opened as a shop selling wine and essential and artisan food products. We also offered takeaway hot drinks and increased to five tables outside.

We bought in more food products such as pasta and pizza flour, which at times were hard for our customers to get hold of. This all helped to create a food market offering. We also offered to deliver the food with the wine, which again helped us to attract new customers.

Re-opening and staff training

For all our efforts to be proactive, we quickly learnt that we needed more signage in the shop at eye level as people didn’t always see some of the signs on the floor and at points struggled with social distancing. We created a one-way system around the shop and split it into five clear zones with more than two metres between each zone. We carefully managed the amount of people in the shop and moved the tables to be two metres apart outside too.

We made sure we followed the updated Welsh government food safety guidance closely to make sure we were set up correctly and checking anything that we were doing differently due to COVID19.

When we brought our staff back off furlough, we also trained them all on the new COVID-19 procedures. We made sure they were empathetic with customers and that they knew how to interact in the right way. It can be awkward at times, especially for the younger staff who may not be as confident.

Working together with local businesses to manage tourists

Food businesses in the area need the custom and depend on the tourist season. We want to show visitors and the local population that we care and we’re doing our best to be safe. To help with this, we worked closely with the pubs in the area to agree that we would all close at 10pm as more customers are outside drinking and it’s a mix of residential and commercial properties. This worked well to keep the noise level down and keep both the locals and visitors happy.

Dolgellau is a small town with not much space for outside dining, so the local council have agreed to be flexible in their approach to parking so that we can stay open safely and have enough space to accommodate customers.

We agreed with the local Council that we could put three small tables on former parking spaces. We’re not sure how long we’ll be able to do this but hoping it might become a permanent feature that will enhance the enjoyment of the urban space.

What would you recommend to other businesses?

I would say look at the space you have and be realistic about what’s achievable. We knew we couldn’t operate the café as it was as we didn’t have the space to run it safely. We had to look at it with fresh eyes and think about what we could do.

What do the next six to twelve months look like for you as a business?

We now have an online wine business and we need to continue to develop it. We’re investing in improving our online ordering system and want to make the process as slick as we can.

We also have more rooms on the second floor and if we’re able to do it safely, we’d like to open them for private dining or wine tasting for people who are in a bubble. These rooms used to be an overflow for the café but we’re thinking about what exciting things we can offer while still staying compliant and protecting our customers.

Whatever happens, we’re aiming to keep the shop open and concentrate on improving every element of what we offer. Our experience throughout COVID-19 has been like starting a new business again, but we now know that we can continue to operate in a lockdown situation and safely connect with our customers.