Try-before-you-buy trend driving up average spend

Newly-opened wine shop Vagabond in Fulham, west London, is enjoying a high average bottle spend due to almost its entire range being available for customers to try-before-they-buy.

Divided up by style, from crisp and aromatic, through elegant and spicy to bold, nearly all of the shop’s 100 wines, which at the moment include Ridge 2007, Alion 2005 and Léoville Barton 1999, are available to try either by the 25ml sip, or 175ml glass.

Customers can purchase a tasting card for £3, and load it with as little as £1 credit. Sips start from 50p, and the £3 card deposit is redeemable.

“Our average spend is £14, which is far higher than most high street retailers," said American owner Stephen Finch. "We’re not about profit margins – we’re all about upselling. One of our best sellers is an obscure Loire Chenin Blanc [Domaine Frantz Saumon Montlouis mineral +] purely because people can discover and taste the wine before they buy it."

“It proved so popular we ordered in a load of magnums over Christmas to keep up with demand," Finch added.

“Having our full range in wine dispensing machines has really helped boost sales. People are really influenced by what they taste. If they find a wine they particularly like, they usually end up walking away with a bottle.

“We sell a lot of Yarra Yering Shiraz at £45 a bottle because people fall in love with it after tasting it – trying ends in buying."

The store also offers take-home tasting note sheets for each of its wines, allowing customers to keep a record of their favourite samples, which often leads to a purchase on return.

Although expensive to buy and install, Finch is seeing a return on his investment from the five wine sampling machines, which each hold 20 wines.

“While a bottle can happily go for up to 18 days on the machine, our bottles are only on there for an average of eight days, which is encouraging," he said.

Which wines are proving the least popular? “Anything with a black label”, Finch admitted. “People just don’t seem to notice them”.

Lucy Shaw, 07.02.2011