The economic recession hit California's wine industry hard in 2008, and Michael Polenske, owner of Blackbird Vineyards, feared sales of his ultra-premium merlot wines would suffer. Yet, even as Napa Valley neighbors continued to struggle, Blackbird revenues rebounded this year and sales are climbing.

The trick, says Polenske, is the Flock Box -- a collection of six little 50-milliliter bottles holding two-ounce tasting portions of Blackbird's five current 2007 releases and one bottle from the 2006 vintage to provide a vintage-to-vintage comparison. For $48, the Flock Box allows consumers to sample the full Blackbird portfolio at a fraction of the $600 it costs to buy full-sized 750-milliliter bottles.

Taste inspires sales, says Polenske. "The point is to get our wine into people's mouths."

Little bottles are the next big thing

Other wineries are getting the message. Tasting bottles are popping up everywhere. So far, the only vendor repackaging wine in sample bottles is 2-year-old TastingRoom.com. But try-before-you-buy isn't a new idea with wine. Retailers have always relied on in-store tastings to introduce customers to new wines. In the last few years, vending machines have expanded the tasting experience to wine bars.

Sample bottles, however, are an innovation that allows consumers to taste wines at home, in private and away from sales people. TastingRoom.com introduced them in March 2010. Since then, 200 California and Washington state wineries have jumped on the bandwagon.

Like Blackbird, some wineries sell the samples directly to consumers in their winery tasting rooms or through wine clubs. Others use the samples to reach restaurants and retailers.

Fifty wineries offer their samples for sale through TastingRoom.com, a portfolio that will increase dramatically in early 2011 when Tim Bucher, founder and president of TastingRoom.com, says his company will begin selling sample bottles of hundreds of French, Italian and South American wines.

To handle the increased volume, Bucher is expanding his Santa Rosa bottling facility to produce 2 million tasting bottles a month, up from its current capacity of 200,000 bottles. "The wine marketing world we live in now is radically different than what existed even a year ago," says Bucher. Nearly every winery he approaches signs up.

The idea for tasting bottles of wine occurred to Bucher after he used samples to spur sales of his Dry Creek Olive Oil. It stood to reason, he thought, that he could increase sales of his Trattore Wines the same way. But wine is trickier than oil. No existing process could guarantee that sample bottles would contain flawless wine that accurately reflected the taste of that same wine in a full-sized bottle.

Growing up in Healdsburg, California, Bucher began making wine in high school and studied viticulture at the University of California at Davis until a computer science elective diverted him to a career in Silicon Valley. As a computer designer, he worked for NeXT, Microsoft  and Dell and he launched successful ventures of his own, including Zing and Mirra.

But he never stopped making wine. And, with the recession, the cost of shipping 750-milliliter samples to restaurants and wine writers seemed unbearably wasteful, he says. Tasting-size sample bottles seemed the perfect solution.

"The aha moment was when it occurred to me to create samples for everyone, not just for myself," says Bucher.

Rebottling takes know-how

In a robotic, zero-oxygen clean room, Bucher rebottles the contents of a regular 750-milliliter wine bottle into 15 50-milliliter sample bottles with screw top closures. The process is patented, but anyone can build a similar clean room, Bucher says. "There are little tricks to make this technology work," he says, noting that one of the biggest challenges was finding a way to preserve the aromas released when you uncork a bottle. "Those trade secrets are the most valuable thing we own."

To ensure the quality of the wine in the samples, one of the 15 bottles is tested. If cork taint, oxidation or any other flaw is detected, all of the samples from that bottle are trashed. "We're helping wineries find problems they didn't even know existed," says Bucher.

Not all wineries, however, are thrilled with the idea of sample bottles, says Bucher. A couple of vintners selling high-priced wines that garner strong critical reviews declined to create the samples, nervous that they had more to lose than gain by making their wines broadly available to sample. Conversely, wineries that produce wines priced below $18 find consumers are willing to buy a regular bottle and do not bother with samples.

Tasting bottles are "the democratization of wine," says Bucher. When consumers can affordably compare the taste of great wines from around the world, their personal taste will dictate what they drink, he says. It's a move away from a critic-driven wine market and toward empowering people to make their own taste choices.

"I want to offer tens of thousands of wines to millions of consumers," he says. "I believe there will be a time when people go to the wine store and buy samples to taste at home before they decide which wines to buy," he says. "I'm hearing from retailers who want them."

If Bucher is right, these little bottles may be the death of wine critics and wine competitions. Will anyone miss them?

Corie Brown, the co-founder and general manager of Zester Daily, is an award-winning food writer at work on a book about climate change and wine.

Photos, from top:

Blackbird wine and bottles from the Flock Box. Credit: Chris Fager

Tim Bucher, founder of TastingRoom.com. Credit: TastingTable.com

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