Only so many hours in the day: How declines in tasting room visitation are at their heart a post-Covid math problem

I read a really interesting, thought-provoking article on Ted Hall's Substack this week. It was titled Napa Valley: a False Signal and argued that the Napa Valley wineries looking at their declining tasting room traffic were misdiagnosing their problem. While the prevailing narrative has been that fewer people are visiting wine country, Ted drew on (very solid) hotel visitation data to argue that in fact, the key challenge facing Napa's wineries was that they were not rising to the challenge of how to attract those customers away from all the other options available to a visitor to wine country. In business parlance, Ted submits that wineries are facing a share problem rather than a demand problem. From a key point in his article:

The wineries taking comfort in the narrative of shared industry decline face the sharpest risk of all. If a winery’s reservations are falling and the winery reads this as an industry-wide condition, waiting for conditions to improve feels rational. The traffic will come back. The market will recover. The next visitor study will confirm that Napa Valley is still a great destination.

The next Visit Napa Valley study, when it arrives, will almost certainly show that visitor volume in 2024 and 2025 continued closing the gap toward the 3.85 million pre-pandemic peak — near the valley’s all-time high. A winery whose reservations fell 15 percent during that period should not find that reassuring. It means the visitors were here — walking downtown, eating at restaurants, buying wine by the glass at hotels, driving past the driveway without turning in — and spent their time elsewhere in the valley.

Ted's article highlights four key reasons why, he thinks, estate tasting rooms are facing declining traffic despite solid wine country visitation numbers:

• The shift of visitors away from traditional estate tasting room experiences (most of which require reservations) toward urban tasting rooms, where walk-ins are easier and more welcome
• The price barrier of high tasting fees for many on-site winery experiences
• The many and growing other non-wine (or at least non-winery) experiences available in and around Napa that are competing for visitors' dollars
• A competitive environment in which high-profile wineries like Castello di Amorosa, Beringer, and Robert Mondavi have made major investments in their visitor experiences and are likely squeezing out smaller players

Are the broader trends that Ted shared applicable to Paso Robles as well? I would say yes. According to Travel Paso, hotel stays in Paso Robles rose 5.2% in 2025 and saw the arrival of more than 1.3 million visitors. At the same time, Community Benchmark reported that tasting room visitors to the Paso Robles tasting rooms that are a part of its data set declined 4.2% in 2025.

So what are those additional visitors to Napa (and Paso Robles) doing if not visiting wineries? Here's where I would offer a somewhat different take than Ted. I think they're still visiting wineries. At least, I haven’t seen any evidence that people who choose to go to our part of wine country are opting for other non-wine activities. Although Ted talks about some new attractions in Napa, there really haven't been any major investments in other daytime things to do in Paso Robles. After-hours events? Sure! There are more than there were, from Sensorio to a selection of artists performing at Vina Robles Amphitheater that I would never have dreamed possible two decades ago. And it's bustling downtown. The hotel options in Paso Robles are the best they’ve ever been. There are more wine-focused restaurants than ever, and they seem as full as ever.

What has changed in a significant way since the pre-Covid visitation peak is how wineries are organizing and managing their traffic. When Covid hit, we had to close our tasting room for about three months. When we reopened, we were under constraints we’d never seen before. Some of those were imposed by governments (like outdoor tastings only, social distancing requirements, and masks in indoor spaces). Some were reactions to what felt safe to us and to our customers. The old belly-up-to-the-bar style of wine tasting felt unsafe on lots of levels. So instead, like many other wineries, we implemented seated tastings, by reservation, on a timed schedule, and started presenting our wines in flights to limit how often our hosts needed to be in our customers’ space. [The blog where we announced these changes makes for interesting reading five years later.]

We found pretty quickly that the majority of our customers preferred this experience. It eliminated people arriving and having to mill around waiting for a space. It meant people in the middle of a tasting never had to squeeze aside to make room for new arrivals. It gave people the ability to have a more intimate shared experience with their group. Instead of having to dump out (or down) one wine in order to get the next, serving in flights offered a chance to compare and contrast different wines, while the longer, more relaxed tastings gave us a chance to better tell our story. We got great anecdotal feedback, and we could measure our guests’ improved experience because our sale per customer and our wine club signup percentage both jumped by about 40% from what we were seeing before Covid. When we reopened indoor tasting a year later, we renovated our tasting bars to provide bar seating so that whether people chose to be at their own table outside or at a shared bar inside, they got the same curated experience.

For all those positives, there were some negatives which we came to recognize over time. One is that tasting by reservation meant a less spontaneous visit. If most popular wineries were booking out at least a few days in advance (or on busy weekends, a few weeks), then asking your tasting room host or your server at a local restaurant what wineries you should visit required waiting until the next time you were in town wine tasting. It also made scheduling a day in wine country feel more like work, and less carefree.

But does this loss of spontaneous visitation explain the decline in tasting room visitation that Ted’s article describes? Or the rising costs? I doubt it. The balance of the evidence suggests that people do enjoy the seated tasting experience, and that they're willing to pay more for a more memorable experience. But there are only so many hours in a day. Because seated tastings take longer, and reservations mean people plan out their days, guests to wine country are visiting fewer wineries each day they go out wine tasting.

We used to see guests who would plan on visiting five or six wineries in a tasting day. If you were in and out in an hour, and you were either spitting or had a driver, that was possible. But no longer. In our scheduling software we allocate two hours between each tasting. That's standard at most winery tasting rooms. While most tasters don’t take the full two hours, an hour and a half is normal. Figure a little time to purchase wine and get on the road, the time to get from one winery to the next, and in practical terms, even someone who wants to spend all day tasting won't make more than three appointments. Imagine this scenario. You start with a 10am tasting and add a noon tasting at a place that also serves lunch. The next time slot you can get to is probably 2:30. Most tasting rooms’ last appointments are at 4pm. Going back into town for lunch doesn't help, and bringing a picnic only helps on the margins. That is why most people I talk to think of three tastings a day as their max, with the possible addition of going to a downtown tasting room at the end of the day for something informal if they feel like continuing to explore.

I think Ted is right to suggest that the decline in tasting room visits is more a share problem than a demand problem. But even more than that, I think it’s a math problem. If before Covid, people would have averaged four (or more) winery visits per day and now they’re averaging three (or less), just to be breaking even, a wine country destination would need to be attracting 33% more tasters just to keep the same number of tasting room visits per day. 

Like many interesting math problems, this one is a version of a classic game theory question: the Prisoner’s Dilemma (If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, I explored another wine-related Prisoner’s Dilemma example: winery association membership in a blog series a decade ago). For this current example, it’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma example because while any individual winery probably does better to have a longer, more immersive experience, it’s likely best for a region’s wineries as a whole for guests to have shorter-lasting tastings so they can get to more tasting rooms each day.

I agree 100% with Ted's conclusion that we’re seeing a period of adjustment rather than a collapse of demand. That’s a good thing! So, what to do to weather the upheaval? Many wineries have leaned into more elaborate experiences in order to justify guests spending more time and money, and that’s logical, to an extent, but comes with higher costs and doesn’t seem likely to me to attract a larger audience of potential wine lovers. Other wineries are trying to make it easier to be spontaneous about a visit by holding spaces in reserve, by staffing up to allow more walk-ins, and by creating less formal spaces where people can come and enjoy a tasting without needing a reservation or a seat.

We're trying both approaches. We created the Legacy Tasting for people who want a deep dive into our library of wines, and have always offered tours to get our guests out into the vineyard and cellar. More recently, we started setting up a walk-up bar on busy days so that even if we're at capacity, people can still get a tasting. This also helps us serve guests who maybe only want a glass of wine to have with a picnic. Our goal in doing that has been to bring the number of times we have to turn a potential guest away to an absolute minimum. We'll be expanding this concept soon; stay tuned for details. Hopefully, it also has the effect of allowing people who want to get in and out efficiently to do so, and will work on the margins to make the math of tasting room visits a little friendlier.

None of this is to say that Ted’s conclusion – that wineries should expect a reality going forward where they have to compete more directly for customers – is wrong. I think he’s right. But the silver lining is that the end impacts are likely to be positive for wine country visitors. There should be a wider range of tasting options, at various prices and levels of formality, for guests to choose from. The reservation experiences are likely to be more immersive and better thought out.

Wine country is busy, vibrant, and full of great options. Let’s celebrate that as we work on the math.