Adelita Wine Bar and Unovino joined forces for remote cellar door

A Brisbane bayside wine bar has partnered with a national direct-to-consumer wine marketplace to provide a unique cellar door experience.

Adelita owner Chris Hollingsworth and Unovino Managing Director Adam Coward, Wynnum. Picture: Liam Kidston

A Brisbane bar has joined forces with a national wine marketplace to revolutionise the cellar door experience.

Online wine marketplace Unovino has recently launched a trial of their ‘remote cellar door’ experience, and Adelita Wine Bar in Wynnum was the first venue to sign on.

Unovino works with small to medium independent wineries and growers to connect them to the public, with direct-to-door deliveries.

Their new ‘remote cellar door’ experience has taken their founding concept and flipped it on its head, giving guests at partner venues the opportunity to experience tastings and access information direct from the winery in a location close to home, and then allow them to order their favourites to be delivered to their door.

Unovino managing director Adam Coward said small wineries were really struggling to break into a market that was overpopulated.

“Unless you are part of a distribution channel, you don’t get access to a good restaurant so we thought ‘how do we group them up?’ and that is the first problem that we have solved,” he said.

“Then it was how could we make it so that the restaurant actually wanted to have that wine coming in as well.”

“Wineries were ultimately getting stuck at the cellar door and had no way, when they were distributing wines, to actually see that customer come back and shop.”

“The whole idea of the remote cellar door is to reward the restaurant for actually promoting the wine and giving them an actual taste of that wine.

The wines offered as part of the remote cellar door vary each month, with three featured wines on offer, complete with a tasting card providing details on the winery and the wine, as well as a QR code that leads to a video of the producer themselves guiding the taster through the experience.

Guests can then choose to use Unovino’s website to order any wine they would like to be shipped to their home, and Coward says the team was trying to develop a point of sale capability they can provide each participating venue with, to make the sales more consumer-friendly.

Adelita owner Chris Hollingsworth said they had been participating in the remote cellar door for several months and that the experience was currently making up around 10 per cent of their sales.

He also revealed that the bar intended to host wine dinner events, similar to what they do already, in partnership with Unovino and the remote cellar door, with hopes of getting the featured producers out to host the events.

Coward said the remote cellar door was in the process of finding investors through equity crowd-funding platform Birchal, with expressions of interest for investors set to close on November 18.

The team hoped to have as many bars and restaurants on board as possible, though at this stage Adelita is the first and only participating venue.