Elevating the virtual experience thanks to Master the World

By Ian Consoli

It is no mystery that I am a huge fan of virtual events for wine club members. We introduced semi-annual virtual pickup parties to accommodate the release of our wine club shipments in fall 2020. We started these virtual events during COVID when we had no choice, but elected to continue them because their benefits in access, intimacy, and convenience were significant. Wine Club members from around the country continue to express their gratitude through emails and social media comments for allowing them to connect with us from afar. Viewership of the events remains consistent, participation remains high, and the conversations started by viewer questions continue to bring value. From my conclusion in a blog I wrote in 2021 on the virtual pickup parties:

We're excited to continue to host this kind of event in the future. We're meeting our members where they are, we're teaching them new recipes, and we're giving them the opportunity to interact with the proprietor, winemaker, and chef.

All-in-all, we can say the virtual events are a success, and we look forward to continuing them. Today, I want to highlight a decision we made that elevated the experience and made the continuation of the series possible: producing tasting packs with Master the World.

It was always clear that we needed an option for guests to taste along with us from home. The first virtual pickup party we did was in the fall and aligned with the latest release of our Esprit de Tablas and Esprit de Tablas Blanc. Those are the only wines we bottle in 375ml packaging, primarily for distribution to restaurants. They worked perfectly as a two-pack for this initial virtual event – not least because restaurants were largely closed at that point, so we had 375ml bottles to spare – but when it came time for our spring shipment, we had no small format bottles to work with. As with any of our virtual tastings, we could invite attendees to pick one Tablas Creek wine to enjoy with the broadcast (from their shipment or not), but we needed something more.

We evaluated repackaging our 750mL bottles into 187mL but faced four significant hurdles.

• Technology: rebottling wines and having them emerge in good shape is a challenge that requires the purchase of specialized equipment and comes with a learning curve.
• Labor: rebottling would pull our cellar team away from their tasks for one to two full days. There's the cost to pay employees for those days and an opportunity cost of what else they would have done.
• Packaging: small batches of anything are expensive. Having to source new bottles and screwcaps, print new labels, and make sure that everything was compliant with the TTB was a non-trivial challenge, and expensive to boot.
• Shipping: the sample kits we proposed must ship around the country. That meant sourcing shipping boxes, negotiating shipping prices, and navigating different states' restrictions on bottle-size limits. Another hurdle for staying compliant.

That is when Master the World (MTW) came on our radar. Founded by Master Sommelier Evan Goldstein and Wine Business pro Limeng Stroh, MTW was created to help sommeliers studying for exams to taste wines from around the world without having to deal with the cost and challenge of sourcing full bottles. To facilitate this, MTW rebottles 750 mL bottles to 187 mL format and builds and ships tasting kits all over the country. Well, that sounded exactly like what were are looking for. Plus, they're pretty darn cute!

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After a call with the founders, we had a solution on our hands. Master the World has a system they developed where every bottle gets tested to ensure it is sound. They rebottle under a layer of inert gas, so the wine gets into the 187ml bottles in good shape. They solved our labor issues by taking on the entire process. All we needed to do was send a few cases of each of the wines in our VINsider Classic Shipment to their facility in Northern California, and they took it from there. They took on the TTB for label approval, and as of spring 2022, they even started making custom labels that match our full-size bottles. The kits sell through Master the World, not Tablas Creek. That allows them to handle all the shipping and compliance, and their licenses enable them to ship to even more states than we can.

We saw an opportunity to allow our virtual attendees to taste all six wines in our classic shipment and went for it. The kits sell for $99, which is manageable for our members and allows us to break even between the cost of wine and MTW's services. Guests purchased all 100 kits we made the first time through Master the World and the 80-kit runs we did for subsequent virtual pickup parties. We found a solution by finding the right partner, and we are delighted with the results for our members.

Our next Virtual Pickup Party is March 24^th, 2023, and the newest set of tasting kits are available now through Master the World's website.

Need another incentive to move to lightweight glass? How about $2.2 million over 14 years?

In recent months we've been thinking a lot about alternatives to the glass bottle. We've been focusing on reusable stainless steel kegs for sale to restaurants and wine bars and for our tasting room. We've put our first few wines in boxes, and received an enthusiastic response. That's important; finding packaging for wines that allow us to forego the bottle entirely is a key part of moving wine to a more sustainable future. But the reality is that no one has come up with a package that's comparable to glass for wines that are meant to age. Its combination of inertness, impermeability, durability, and track record means that most of our wines are likely to remain packaged in glass for the foreseeable future. That's why I'm so happy that we made the call back in 2010 to move to lightweight glass for all our wines.

Lightweight glass has a number of advantages. It takes fewer raw materials and less energy to make. It weighs less empty and full, so cases require less fuel to transport. You can fit more pallets on a truck before you reach the truck's weight limit. It makes bottles that are easier to pour and fit better in most people's wine racks. And according to the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, a winery can reduce its total carbon footprint by 10% just by moving from average glass bottles (around 23 ounces each) to lightweight glass (around 16). If they instead are using a heavy bottle (something like 30 ounces, and there are even heavier bottles out there) the savings are even more substantial: something like 22%. From the CSWA's report:

All those are good reasons to move to lighter bottles. And those, along with the perception that our packaging was out of step with the environmental initiatives we'd implemented in the vineyard, are pretty much the reasons we did so. From a blog I wrote in 2010:

As we thought about the challenge and looked at bottle after bottle we came to the conclusion that the aesthetic idea that a broader, taller bottle is higher quality may be becoming a relic of a more profligate age, in the same way that it's easy to imagine a future where the luxury SUV -- for a time the epitome of solid, prosperous respectability -- carries an ever-greater implication of environmental tone-deafness.

For all that we knew that lighter glass costs less to make and transport, that consideration wasn't central to our decision. So when I was asked by a writer last week how much we were saving by using lighter glass, I needed to calculate it. When I did, I didn't believe what I had learned. That decision, back in 2010, has saved us something like $2,236,346 over the last 14 years. To come to this figure, I looked at just two sources of cost: what we pay for the bottles themselves, and what we pay to ship the filled bottles to our customers via UPS and FedEx. First, a little then-and-now. In our pre-2010 period, we were using two different bottles. One was a somewhat-lighter-than-average bottle, around 19 ounces, which we used for around 80% of our production. The other was a big, impressive, heavy bottle, modeled after the one used at Beaucastel, that weighed 31.5 ounces and which we reserved for the Esprit de Beaucastel, Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc, and Panoplie. We put about 20% of our production in that heavy bottle.

Looking back at our invoices that show what we paid for our new 16.5 ounce bottle vs. what we were paying for the previous bottles gives us the first figure. When we made the move, we paid $0.60/bottle less than the heavy bottle, and a little more than $0.06/bottle less than the mid-weight bottle we had been using. At our average 30,000 case/year (360,000 bottle/year) output, that produced a savings of $43,440 per year for the 20% of our production that had been packaged in heavy glass, and $19,760 for the 80% of our production that had been going into the mid-weight bottle. Add them up, and that's $63,200 per year in savings on glass purchases.

For the shipping, we looked at what we're charged by UPS and FedEx to ship our wines to our customers. It's not as simple as just calculating the reduction in weight, because shippers charge based on a combination of package dimensions and weight, but there are still significant savings. The average cost increase to ship mid-weight bottles vs. our current lightweight bottles would be about 5%. The average increase were we to ship heavy bottles (which weigh 30.6% more full than our current bottles) would be 16%. Last year, we spent $1,340,820 on shipping wine. It's our single largest expense after payroll. Adding 5% to our costs of shipping the 80% of our production that was in mid-weight bottles would increase that bill by $53,633 per year. Adding 16% to our costs of shipping the 20% in heavy bottles would add another $42,906. Together that's $96,539 of additional shipping costs that we'd be incurring now if we were still using the bottle mix we were in 2009. 

Add the $63,200 to the $96,539 and you get $159,739 per year. Over 14 years that adds up to $2,236,346. Wowza.

It's worth noting that this almost certainly understates the savings. Glass has gotten more expensive over the last 14 years, so the difference between lighter and heavier bottles has likely increased. I didn't try to calculate the difference in truckloads of palletized wine going our for distribution or to our shipping fulfilment provider. I didn't add in the greater physical footprint needed for the larger cases that are needed for larger bottles. And we were only using heavy bottles for 20% of our wine. If we'd been using 100% heavy bottles and had made this switch, our savings would have calculated out at $446,211 per year.

It seems like we're reaching a tipping point on moving toward lighter glass, driven by advocacy within the industry (from groups like the IWCA) and from press (shout-out to Jancis Robinson for being at the forefront). I'm hopeful that wineries are doing this from a genuine commitment to sustainability. But if they're not, there are other incentives out there. Millions of small, green, rectangular ones.