DIGITALES: A Virtual Tales of the Cocktail Experience
by Carolyn Heneghan
New Orleanians look forward to three things in the summer: sno-balls, sipping mint juleps on the porch, and Tales of the Cocktail. This premier annual event for the bar and alcohol industries has long been a financial oasis for the city’s bars and restaurants during the steamy New Orleans summertime, which is the doldrums of local tourism. However, the global COVID-19 pandemic changed all that for this year’s event, scheduled for July 21-25, 2020.
Shift Change As a critical summertime economic generator for the city, Tales of the Cocktail, affectionately known as Tales, has been a landmark festival-scale event for the hospitality industry for the past 18 years. The seasonal increase in tourism and hospitality sales provides a much-needed boost for both the finances and morale of local bars, restaurants, and other local businesses. But for summer 2020, New Orleans faces a large-scale events shutdown in response to COVID-19. On top of closing doors and struggling with limited hours, menus, and capacity for months, businesses will now also lose much of the revenue they generate from the week of Tales each year. “Immediately, my heart broke for our community,” said Caroline Rosen, executive director for the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation. “And it also broke for a larger global community because it is truly a time when this community can gather to learn as well as really be able to spotlight new and amazing work.” Tales of the Cocktail won't host the traditional in-person seminars, tastings, brand experiences, and other events at various local establishments in 2020. But organizers have made a concerted effort to shift much of the usual programming to a digital format with virtual experiences. “We just had to take a step back and see what the essence of Tales is and what makes it important and try to find ways that we could do that digitally,” said Rosen, “but while also keeping in mind the restraints of being digital.”
Virtual Seminars and Tastings Education has long been a core component of the Tales experience, usually delivered as seminars hosted by industry experts and brand representatives. For this year's digital event, Tales will instead host complimentary virtual seminars. Some will stream live, some are prerecorded, and several will include live chat and live Q&A sessions to enable real-time interaction and connections between the audience and presenters. Most difficult to replace or to transform from the
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traditional format to virtual have been the spirits tastings and Spirited Dinners hosted by liquor brands. Attendees won't be sipping on whiskey or gin together this year, but brand teams have configured a range of virtual experiences for Global Tales. Sessions range from guided tastings and behind-thescenes tours to virtual brand “booths” via a Tales-sponsored app. These experiences more deeply explore the agricultural and production aspects of bringing these products to life behind the bar.
alcoholic beverage industries. Past years have featured daily morning runs, mocktail demonstrations, yoga classes, 12step meetings, and seminars focused on sleep, nutrition, and mental health, among other health and wellness topics. Event organizers continue to finalize Beyond the Bar content. This year, the daily morning runs continue globally via the Tales app, and free wellness activities switch to a virtual format. Brands can sponsor fitness classes, such as yoga, boxing, pilates, and cycling, or hands-on trainings, including pressure-point therapy, self-massage, and taping/ bracing workshops. In place of mocktails prepared by esteemed mixologists for attendees each day, experts will virtually demonstrate recipes for no- and low-alcohol cocktails via video clips shared on the app. “With so much bad news and uncertainty, I can say that it's been really amazing to see the creativity of the community, and I'm excited to showcase a lot of that during the week of Tales,” said Rosen.
Going Global
“Even though you're not going to be able to go through those tastings, we're having some of our partners really give us exclusive access,” said Rosen. “So it's a collector's home, or we can see where the spirit came from. People are really getting creative.”
Health and Wellness on Tap Now in its third year, Tales of the Cocktail’s Beyond the Bar programming has focused on health and wellness for hospitality workers, particularly in the bar, restaurant, and
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As one promising opportunity from its digital iteration, Tales can now reach more people living across the world via the virtual platform. This includes attendees who can't afford the travel costs or ticketed events but who want to learn more about the bar and alcohol industries as professionals and consumers. The mandated COVID adaptations may end up inspiring lasting changes to the Tales experience that could further expand the event’s impact throughout the industry worldwide. “Now that we have agreed to keep the date and really focused on a digital platform, we're hoping that we're going to be able to reach more people than we ever have in the past,” Rosen said. “And, hopefully, we’ll bring that community to more people not only around New Orleans and the States, but around the globe.” New Orleans may not get to enjoy Tales of the Cocktail in person for 2020. But the Crescent City will see a new side of its beloved summer event that may encourage more national and international visitors in the years to come.
