Golf club selling wine by the crate to members to cover Covid tabs

A Scottish golf club is offering crates of wine to its members to make up for unused bar tabs during Covid lockdowns.

Tantallon Golf Club in North Berwick includes a bar credit of up to £75 in its annual subscription which is put into members’ personal accounts.

Unused credit is usually written off at the end of the year so the club decided that, as the last year has been so unusual, members can use their credit now to buy wine by the crate.

Some members were reportedly left with large amounts still to be spent.

A meeting of East Lothian Licensing Board was told the club’s council had decided last year to carry the 2020 bar accounts over to 2021 because of Covid lockdowns.
But it meant that a number of full members had built up credit and the club was now keen to give them the chance to spend it before December 31 when leftover cash would once again be written off.

The club’s Andy Edwards told the virtual meeting of the board that the club wanted to introduce a wine scheme which would give members the chance to buy it by the crate to use up their balances.

He said the club currently has 300 full time members with an additional 70 country members, who live more than 100 miles from the clubhouse and 60 social or non-playing members.

He said: “As part of our annual subscription for all our members they are levied with an amount which is attributable to an account on their card for bar purchases and can be spent on food and drink.

“For full members that amounts to £75 annually, it is an encouragement for people to come to the clubhouse and socialise with the other members.

“However last year 2020 obviously with all of the closures of the clubhouse through Covid lockdowns our council decided it was unreasonable to write off these balances so brought them forward into 2021.”

He said the purpose of the charge was to encourage members to use the clubhouse and socialise with other members.

He told the board that this year the club’s council had agreed to revert to writing off unused bar credit and wanted to give members the chance to spend remaining credit.

He said: “We have found some members have built up a reasonable amount over the two years which we would like to give them the opportunity to use those balances up.

“What the council would like to do is come up with a scheme, for example, selling a case or two cases of wine to members which we would order on a case by case basis for collection from the clubhouse so they can use up their balances before they are written off on the 31st of December.”

The club applied for a general off-sales licence for the clubhouse which was described as a well-run business by the board’s trading standards officer.

The licence was unanimously granted.