Tasting Room Conversion: What the Best Wineries Do Differently with Liz Mercer, Partner at WISE Academy
Liz Mercer started in a tasting room 26 years ago as a temp, barely knowing how to use a corkscrew, learning by doing. She worked every facet of direct-to-consumer: events, trade hospitality, wine club management, and DTC strategy across small family wineries, large publicly traded corporations, and everything in between. In 2009, WISE co-founder Lesley Berglund approached her with a simple idea: what would happen if the wine industry actually professionalized direct-to-consumer? Liz has been building that answer ever since, and in 2016 she transitioned to full-time at WISE, where she is now a partner.
Liz sat down with Lauren Heindel to walk through what WISE’s mystery shopping data, leadership programs, and deep industry relationships reveal about tasting room performance in 2025, and what wineries can do right now to convert more guests, build stronger teams, and stop leaving data on the table.
Most tasting rooms have the raw material for significantly better performance. The wine is good. The setting is compelling. The team is willing. What separates wineries where hospitality converts naturally into club signups and lasting customer relationships from wineries where it does not is rarely the wine or the location. It is the systems, the empowerment, and the intentionality of the experience those teams are equipped to deliver.
In this episode, we cover:
Why the wineries performing best in 2025 have reduced their dependency on the tasting room as the primary driver of DTC growth, and how they are building a broader channel mix
What WISE's mystery shopping data reveals about the gap between how well wineries train their teams and how well they empower them to adapt in the moment
Why guest expectations are now set by airport lounges, boutique hotel concierge levels, and VIP festival experiences, and what "experience within the experience" means for winery hospitality
The WISE fundamental that separates wineries with natural, high-converting tasting rooms from those that feel scripted or overly passive: sales come through superb service
Why 60 to 90 minutes of one-on-one time with a guest is a competitive advantage most wineries are systematically failing to use, and how to fix that with data capture
What the best tasting rooms will invest in heading into 2026, including ongoing coaching, free industry resources, and technology they are already paying for but not fully using
What top-performing tasting rooms have in common
WISE has been conducting mystery shops using consistent evaluation criteria since 2012, accumulating thousands of data points across tasting rooms up and down the West Coast and beyond. The pattern Liz describes when you walk into a top-performing tasting room is not about facility size or price point. It is about cohesion. The brand story is differentiated, the team feels confident rather than scripted, and the experience comes alive at every touch point from arrival to the moment you leave with wine.
Where the industry has consistently underperformed is the sales side. Wineries have done meaningful work elevating the hospitality experience over the last decade, and that shows in the mystery shop data. The conversion gap remains, and it is not because winemaking has declined. It is because hospitality and sales are being treated as separate disciplines when the best tasting rooms understand them as the same thing.
The emotional connection piece is central to how Liz explains it. When a host is truly bought into the brand story, genuinely interested in the guest, and empowered with enough material to have a real conversation rather than deliver a presentation, guests feel the difference immediately. When a host is running a script and cannot deviate from it, guests feel that too. Liz and Lauren experienced this firsthand on a mystery shop together: a two-hour experience with a host who returned to the same talking points every time a question pushed outside the scripted path, providing information that was at times factually incorrect, and never discovering anything meaningful about the guests sitting in front of him.
Am I falling in love with your brand? Are the cues there to help me fall in love with that story? And does it come alive at every touch point in that guest experience? That's what the winning wineries are doing. They're creating memorable, emotional connections.
Liz Mercer , Partner
WISE Academy
Walk into your own tasting room as a mystery shopper once a quarter, or ask a trusted colleague from outside your winery to do it. Use a consistent rubric: Does the host discover something personal about me in the first five minutes? Is the brand story differentiated from what I would hear at the winery next door? Does the experience feel adapted to me, or delivered at me? The gap between what you think your tasting room delivers and what a first-time guest actually experiences is often wider than operators expect.
The experience economy has reset what guests expect
The shift in guest expectations that Liz tracks in her work did not originate inside the wine industry. It came from outside it. Guests who visit a tasting room today have been shaped by airport lounges, boutique hotel concierge levels, VIP festival experiences, and any number of industries that have invested in layered, personalized hospitality in ways that were uncommon even a decade ago. Those guests are not comparing your tasting room to the winery down the road. They are comparing it to every premium experience they have had anywhere.
The concept Liz returns to is the experience within the experience. The outer experience is the tasting. The inner experience is what makes the visit memorable: the moment the host asks exactly the right question, the story about the vineyard block that the guest could not have read on the website, the invitation to go deeper with the brand that feels like a natural next step rather than a sales pitch. That is what guests are looking for, and the wineries that deliver it are the ones building the kind of loyalty that survives a bad traffic year.
The practical implication is that differentiation is no longer just about the wine. In a landscape where hundreds of wineries are producing excellent wine from excellent fruit, the experience becomes the competitive advantage. Wineries that are still relying on world-class farming and world-class winemaking to close a club sale, without an equally world-class hospitality layer, are leaving much of the available revenue on the table.
It's a great idea to let them do the heavy lifting and figure those things out and then see where we can adapt in our industry. The experience within the experience: you walk into almost any airport in this country and there are lounges, the experience within the experience.
Liz Mercer , Partner
WISE Academy
The next time you travel, whether through an airport, a hotel, or a festival, pay attention to the moments that make the premium tier feel different from the standard one. They are almost never about the physical product. They are about information the host already had before you arrived, a question that acknowledged what you care about, an invitation that felt personal rather than automatic. Those are the design choices your tasting room can replicate without a renovation budget.
Hospitality first, sales as a natural extension
The most common mistake Liz identifies in tasting rooms is swinging too far in either direction: too aggressive on the close, which creates pressure and defensive guests, or too passive, which creates warm experiences that do not convert. Both are failures of the same underlying problem, the absence of a clear, confident, guest-centered approach to guiding people toward a purchase or a club membership.
The WISE philosophy is stated simply: sales come through superb service. What that means in practice is that every interaction is oriented toward understanding what the guest genuinely loves, reinforcing it through the conversation, and making the close feel like a natural extension of the service rather than a pivot into sales mode. Liz describes the specific mechanics: say the wine’s name again. Reinforce what the guest responded to. Ask how many to set them up with. Mention that the wine they love is a club member’s favorite. Connect the mailing list to the event the guest just expressed interest in. None of these moves are aggressive. All of them require the host to have been paying attention.
The brochure Liz and Lauren encountered during their mystery shop was a useful illustration of the failure mode. Marketing had done its job: the brochure was beautifully designed, well written, and sitting in front of the guests the entire visit. The host never mentioned it. The assumption was either that the guests would pick it up on their own or that bringing it up would feel pushy. The result was that a high-quality marketing investment sat unused within arm’s reach of two people who might have joined the club, and the conversation ended without an ask.
Sales comes through superb service. If we are giving phenomenal guest experiences, then we should be following that up with the sales being a natural extension.
Liz Mercer , Partner
WISE Academy
Identify the one ask your team most consistently avoids. For most tasting rooms, it is either the club pitch or the mailing list ask, not the wine purchase. Pick one of those and make it the only thing you work on for the next thirty days: teach the exact language, practice it in pre-shift, and track whether the ask is being made on every visit. The conversion lift from a consistent ask almost always exceeds what wineries expect, because most teams are simply not asking.
Empowering teams beyond the script
Liz draws a clear distinction between training and empowerment, and she argues that the wine industry has gotten reasonably good at training while remaining underdeveloped on empowerment. A trained host knows the information. An empowered host knows how to figure out which part of that information to use with the person standing in front of them.
The practical path to empowerment is giving teams more to draw from: vineyard walk-throughs on slow days so hosts can describe what they actually saw that week, fireside chats with the winemaker so the production story comes through firsthand rather than from a script, regional fact sheets from local vintners associations that most wineries have access to for free and almost none are using as training resources. When a host has experienced the vineyard, knows the winemaker, and understands the regional context, they can fill the airtime with something that adapts to the guest in front of them rather than defaulting to the same talking points regardless of who is listening.
The other dimension Liz emphasizes is breaking down silos between the tasting room team and the production team. At wineries where hospitality and production operate in separate buildings with limited contact, the tasting room team’s connection to the story they are being asked to tell is often abstract. A cellar worker who occasionally interacts with the tasting room team, or a winemaker who occasionally has a conversation with the hosts about what is actually happening in fermentation or in the vineyard this week, changes what the tasting room team has to offer. When the team feels genuinely connected to the winery, guests feel it.
Giving the team members a broad treasure chest of stories, a broad treasure chest of ways to do the experience, and to adapt to the individuals that are in front of them with what their needs are. Teach them how to read the room and adapt to that experience, to that guest.
Liz Mercer , Partner
WISE Academy
Take one Tuesday per month and use it for cross-pollination: bring the cellar team into the tasting room for thirty minutes, or take the tasting room team out to the vineyard or through the barrel room. This is not a formal training session. It is exposure that gives your hosts a story to tell for the next month: "I was just out in the vineyard last week, and let me tell you what I saw." That kind of currency is more effective at engaging guests than any amount of product knowledge delivered in a classroom setting.
Guest data is the competitive advantage you are probably not using
Liz’s observation about the 60 to 90 minute window is pointed: there is almost no other industry in the world where you get that much one-on-one time with your ideal customer, and they are telling you what they like, what they are celebrating, what other wineries they love, where they had dinner last night. That information is being gathered in the air over every tasting table in every tasting room, and most of it evaporates when the guest leaves because it never made it into any system.
What gets recorded becomes usable. What does not gets lost. The host who discovered that the guest is celebrating an anniversary, prefers bold red wines, and has visited three times before delivers a fundamentally different second visit if the next host knows those things. Without a note in the system, that context disappears. The relationship restarts from zero. The competitive advantage that a 90-minute conversation should have created does not exist.
Technology investment without adoption is the pattern Liz sees most consistently. Wineries are paying for platforms capable of tagging preferences, reviewing reservation notes before a visit, flagging returning customers, and connecting mailing list growth to specific hosts and visits. Most of them are barely scratching the surface of what those tools can do. The limiting factor is not the software. It is the culture around what constitutes a complete guest interaction, and whether getting information into the system is understood as part of the hospitality job rather than an administrative afterthought.
Our wine educators, our hosts have those conversations, and it goes up here, but it does not come out here. It does not get into the system, so that whoever picks up that relationship doesn't have any of the context.
Liz Mercer , Partner
WISE Academy
Pick three data points and require them on every visit log: the guest's wine preference (red, white, style), the occasion or reason for the visit, and one personal detail that came up in conversation. That is it. Three fields. Once the habit is established and the team sees those notes being used when guests return, the motivation to capture them becomes self-reinforcing. Start with three, not with everything the system can hold.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Winery Tasting Room Conversion
Why isn't my tasting room converting guests into wine club members? +
Tasting room conversion gaps typically come from one of two directions: teams that are too passive and hope guests will join the club without being asked, or teams that are too scripted and push toward the close without first building genuine connection. Both patterns produce low conversion. The most consistent finding from WISE Academy's mystery shopping data is that top-converting tasting rooms ask for the close as a natural extension of a personalized, attentive hospitality experience rather than as a separate sales moment. When a host has genuinely listened, reinforced what the guest loved, and built a real conversation, the close becomes a recommendation rather than a pitch.
What does a top-performing tasting room look like compared to an average one? +
Top-performing tasting rooms show up as cohesive: the brand story is clearly differentiated, the host adapts to each guest rather than delivering a standard presentation, and the experience comes alive consistently across the full visit. WISE Academy's mystery shopping criteria include whether the brand story is distinct, whether the host discovers personal information about the guest early in the visit, whether the sales ask is made confidently, and whether the experience reflects genuine hospitality rather than a scripted walkthrough. Where the industry has underperformed consistently is the sales side: hosts who create excellent experiences but do not follow through with the close.
How should winery tasting room teams capture guest data? +
Winery tasting room teams should capture guest data at the point of interaction, not afterward. At minimum, a useful record includes the guest's wine preferences, the occasion or reason for the visit, and one personal detail that came up in conversation. Most winery technology platforms support note fields, preference tagging, and reservation notes that can be reviewed before a visit to recognize returning guests and personalize the interaction. The barrier to data capture is almost never the technology: it is whether the team understands that completing a guest record is part of the hospitality job, not a separate administrative task.
What KPIs should wineries track for tasting room performance? +
The most actionable tasting room KPIs are the ones every host on the floor can answer for themselves in real time: conversion to purchase, conversion to wine club, conversion to mailing list, and average order value. WISE Academy refers to these three conversion metrics as the WISE Triple Score. Tracking more KPIs than the team can act on creates noise without driving behavior change. Open book management, posting scorecards and reviewing performance regularly with the team, builds the shared ownership that converts metrics from management information into something the team is actively trying to improve.
What should wineries focus on to improve tasting room performance in 2026? +
Wineries that will improve tasting room performance heading into 2026 are investing in ongoing coaching rather than one-time training, fully utilizing the technology they are already paying for, using free resources from local vintners associations as team training material, and taking calculated risks on new touchpoints like outbound events, roadshows, and more structured post-visit follow-up. The single highest-leverage 30-day action is committing to consistent data capture on every guest, starting with the next time the tasting room opens. The wineries that follow up with every guest and nurture those relationships are the ones that become memorable, and memorable relationships are the ones that drive long-term DTC growth.