How do you drink during lockdown?
It’s week 13 of the UK lockdown and we can’t decide if it’s raced by or the quintessential never ending groundhog day. We posted in March about the uncertainty ahead, the shift we were planning to make to shift our business to survive and get through. Three months on, we are happy to report that we have grown our direct to consumer base (79% of all wine sold in April and May is Direct to consumer, the inverse of our normal business), and really happy that a lot of people have discovered us as UK wine drinkers looked to 1. support small businesses and 2. buy local. Sadly however, our trade sales have dropped off massively, and we see our customers through Hallgarten, and direct trade relationships we have, suffering significantly. We’ve been happy to see some of our retailers doing well and hope the restaurants can see a positive bounceback beginning in July.
How are customers buying and drinking during lockdown?
Whilst we’ve all been cooped up at home, the way people are buying and sharing wine has been a real joy to see - and glad we’ve been able to help people stay connected during lockdown. Here are a few of our favourite trends:
Thinking of others and gifting to your friends & loved ones
25% of all orders so far in lockdown were gifts ordered to be sent to friends and loved ones, compared to 7% of our orders prior. Are we getting more generous? Not only were orders being sent across the UK but we had quite a few orders from around the world, sending to UK based friends. Building on this, we’ve also had some new corporate clients who are sending boxed Blackbook wine to their colleagues to say thanks for all the hard work during lockdown.
Drinkalong wine
We launched a ‘lock in case’ deal which is a sample pack of all 6 of our current wines available. This has been by far our most popular order during lockdown. What we’ve loved seeing across instagram and twitter since, is that these are being bought by groups of people to drink virtually together. We’ve had a family across three households sharing a bottle each week, we’ve had groups of friends trying a few together. Happy that we have helped bring a different dimension to the catch ups.
Tutored tastings
Similar to above, groups are order en masse, but in some cases we’ve been invited to join them and talk through the wines and run a tutored tasting. This has been a fun way to bring the wines to new groups and great that we can do this from our living room, reaching people across the country. We’ve also run a couple of drinkalong tastings on instalive during many of the English Wine Good Fridays, it’s such a thrill when we are hearing your thoughts and comments on our wines live with us. We’ll be doing more for English Wine Week, do join us again, or get in touch if you want to book a private event with us.
Word of mouth
Recommend to a friend - at least 12% of our orders (not everyone tells us where they heard about us!) are from customers who have been recommended to try our wine via a friend. THANK YOU for sharing the love for our wines, it means a lot to us. We were a little surprised to see which of our wines were most popular, outside of our lock in case, 41% of all wine orders were across our 2 red wines, and who said people didn’t want to drink an English red!
Our own drinkalong with friends
Breakdown of individual consumer bottle sales by wine, during lockdown (Mar-Jun 2020)
English Wine Week 2020
It’s English Wine Week starting next week, and for the rest of lockdown and through EWW, we are continuing our lockdown offers - the lock in case, free shipping for 3+ bottles and free local shipping around the winery. We’re also launching a few new case offers and gift packs, so watch this space for more coming soon. We’ll be running a few special, virtual events for our followers during English Wine Week:
15 minute tastings: On instagram live at 8pm each night from Saturday 20th June through to Thursday 25th June we’ll taste one of our wines and talk you through it. The full schedule to be published on our instagram page, be ready to drink along with us.
The “Not another virtual quiz” English Wine Quiz: Friday 26th June at 8pm, we’ll host an hour long instagram live pub quiz on English Wine, bring a friend, play together and drink along with us.
Private virtual winery tour & tasting: Saturday 27th June at 8pm, join us to round off the week with a special and interactive virtual wine tasting and tour of our winery. This will be available for customers who buy our gift packs or case orders, inclusive or as an add on, as well as our wine club members.