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This blog site includes news on latest wines, food, events, offers and happenings at artisan & vine. It also includes stories of my wine adventures in and outside the bar, wine facts and wine profiles.

Tuesday 11 August 2009

Wine shop or not shop

I've been thinking a lot lately about the artisan&vine wine shop.
I've been thinking: people seem to really love our wines, but they rarely buy them to take home. Customers enthuse about what they taste at artisan&vine in a way people don't usually enthuse at bars and restaurants. These wines seem to create an interactive, participatory experience.
So, why then, do we sell such a small amount of wine to take home?
The prices are very competitive, of that I'm certain.
Maybe tasting wine at artisan&vine is a participatory experience that includes the feel of our little bar on St John's Hill.
Most likely, I've done a very bad job telling people that there is the ability to take wines home. It's easy to get caught up talking only about the wines and the exciting places they've evolved from.
Should we have a sign? An accompanying online shop? Do we give up on retail and accept we'll always be primarily a bar?
Come visit us soon... I'm sure we'll have dreamt up something in the very near future.
Share your opinion by voting in the poll on this site (until 30 Aug 09).

Image: sometimes I wonder if our pretty little Georgian building looks more like a home than a bar or shop!

3 comments:

gregnbaker said...

My excuse for not having purchased anything yet is I haven't managed to come back and visit!
The prices seem very competitive and I loved all of those tasted a few weeks ago.
I'll be back soon!

Ricard said...

Kathryn, great that we can buy wines to take home. But I can't find them anywhere on the a&v website... When you say the prices are "very competitive", that's very attractive, but how are you going to display them against the prices for the bar? In the same way that St. John do, side by side? What's the shop price for the Domaine De Villeneuve 2005, for example?

winey brett said...

Interesting conundrum. Customers will only see what they want to see. When I ran my wine bar I tried to sell our wines off-sale (at decent prices) and, really, the only successful off-sales were in the run up to Christmas!