Wine Tasting Center Part 2

Wine Sampling Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Yesterday we talked with Roger Clute, executive director of the Wenatchee Valley Visitors Bureau who has recently opened a wine tasting room inside the bureau featuring 4 different wineries each week. A machine dispenses an exact amount of a wine to be sampled and Clute says in the short amount of time that the tasting room has been open they have seen a good return.

CLUTE: There has been a lot of buzz about it and we’ve had a few people stop by, we’ve sold a few bottles of wine because with this permit that we have from Washington State Liquor Board we can sell wine by the bottle. So far since Friday we’ve had a couple dozen people go through it.

They opened the tasting room for the first time last Friday and since they are closed on Sundays they have only had a few days to try it out.

CLUTE: And it is in conjunction with our visitors center so my board of directors thought that it would be a good way to help build traffic especially since wine tourism is getting to be a big part of the tourism economy especially in eastern Washington.

The tasting room at the Visitors Bureau is not really adding much to the overhead.

CLUTE: Well that’s kind of the great thing, I mean, one of the roadblocks to having wine tasting rooms in downtown Wenatchee of course is the cost of rent and all the overhead. And since we’re already taking care of that overhead in our visitor center and we have staffing we can put in this facility fairly inexpensively and the cost of operations isn’t much greater that what we already have.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.