As studies show a spike in alcohol consumption during the pandemic, one startup at the Harvard Innovation Labs is offering private, virtual wine tastings that you can experience at home.
Night Inn is a platform that offers curated online experiences provided by restaurant industry experts. The company currently offers an online wine tasting experience called OnlineVine. And it has also recently launched virtual cocktail-making classes.
While the company is focused on providing virtual tastings and classes, the original idea was to create and deliver in-home experiences.
“By the time we were ready to launch, Covid hit," said co-founder/head of product of Night Inn, Rena Ogura. "We were in a very odd spot from a startup perspective. You have this core concept, you are ready to launch and all of a sudden, the market is no longer viable for that product you tested out in. In my mind, the question was, do we wait, and do we pause on this journey, or do we try a virtual alternate model?"
Pivoting its business model from in-person to virtual did have a huge benefit—the number of sommeliers and industry experts interested in hosting events increased.
Ogura said that before the coronavirus pandemic, sommeliers liked the idea of the company, but weren’t willing to give up Friday night shifts at a restaurant to host a couple of sessions with Night Inn. That changed when Covid-19 forced the restaurant industry to shut down and millions of workers lost their jobs.
Founded in Feb. 2020, the company currently has eight hosts. The hosts don’t have to be sommeliers, but they do have to have at least three years of experience working in the restaurant industry, with a primary focus on wine and wine service.
Hosts also need to be certified by either The Court of Master Sommeliers or the Wine and Spirit Education Trust.
In the future, Night Inn hopes to provide beer, whiskey and Japanese sake experiences as well.
“What differentiates us from any other wine tasting is that we're not bringing somebody into your personal space to lecture you," Ogura said.
"We are really looking to meet you halfway in terms of what you want to get out of the experience," Ogura added. "And oftentimes what we see with a lot of our guests, is they want to have as much of a good time as they want to learn about delicious wines. So we're always looking for hosts that have that energy, that are really excited to be around people who are enthusiastic about wine but may or may not know about it.”
Signing up for a virtual experience is easy. To book the event, customers first need to decide if they want a wine tasting or cocktail-making class, and then they need to fill out additional information like the date of the event, time and number of guests.
Guests also have the opportunity to scroll through the list of hosts and pick who they want to run the event. After that, customers are then asked a number of questions about their wine preferences, price range and if they want the wine delivered or if they want to pick it up themselves.
The experts at Night Inn curate a list of wine or cocktails for the event and coordinate shipping and delivery. When it’s time for the event, guests simply log onto Google Meet and have a good time.
The standard session lasts an hour and includes two bottles of wine. The experience costs $140 dollars plus the cost of the wine and its delivery fee. One unique trait about OnlineVines is that customers can bring their own wine to the tastings—guests do not need to have the experts select and ship wine to them for the event.
Since June 2020, Night Inn has completed 150 virtual experiences. And once the coronavirus pandemic subsides, the company will offer both virtual and in-person experiences. With in-person experiences, a sommelier or restaurant expert will travel to a person’s home and deliver a wine tasting or class directly to the consumers.
Night Inn will launch its in-person experiences in New York and hopes to expand to more cities like Boston and San Francisco later this year.
