Sometimes  the winery fails,  we won’t mention any names, but we do keep track and in the future won’t recommend them, but for these posts we will just post the information.  We walked in to one winery and a young woman was scurring around filling the refridgerator cabinets, she went to get a tasting room person and then started our tasting herself.  We chose the cheese pairing tasting which was $10, with wine included.  The cheeses were phenomenal.  Turns out the girl who greeted us is the cheese expert.  Our pourer, was immature knew little about wine and less about how to converse with grown ups.  The wines were bland and boring.  Thank goodness for the amazing cheese!  We asked about the history of the name of the wines and the pourer started to tell us and was quickly interrupted by another who said “No no no!  That’s not right at all!”  She went on to explain the misinterpretation, but we were left feeling the other girl was spilling secrets and…she who was already nervous at conversing, was now belittled in front of guests.  We are continuing to learn, but we now have a bit of experience and have a growing but relative good palate, and some wines just are bad, sometimes because the wines don’t sell and they serve, brown and over the hill wines, which does not promote them well sometimes the wine is just bad, when the service is bad it makes it even worse.

Another Wine Stop

A couple at we met in the tasting room at Tablas Creek yesterday encouraged us to give a winery we had a bad experience with  another try.   When we walked into the winery, they were slightly more friendly when we arrived then the first time.  We stopped to pet the large dog sitting just inside the door way and as we started to move forward almost got run over by a lady coming through a door with box lunches.  I stepped back and squished Michaels toe.  She said excuse me, but in the tone of voice that indicated that I should get out of her way.  We came into the tasting room and were able to make eye contact with a woman on the end.  She turned out to be perky and pleasant.  Maybe trying to be a little too cute.  She was thrilled by the kitchy names of the wines and the funny pictures on the labels, but really could tell us very little about the wines.  The wines felt thin even where they should have been beefy. Our pourer had fun making faces at the baby the people next to us had with them.  At one point the tasting room manager came through and our taster said, that was a really good idea you had about greeting customers when they come in!  It’s like walmart, it really seems to work.  LOL Really?!  We will not return or drink their wines again.   I’m HUGELY grateful that the tastings were free!

We had an experience a while ago going into a tasting room, where the 3 people working there were having so much fun joking around with each other, that we almost felt like we were intruding.  First impression you think it was a bunch of younger girls right?  Nope, this was an older woman and older man and a younger man in his late 20’s.  You would have thought they would have known better.  On top of it their wines all tasted alike!  All the varietals!  I couldn’t tell the Syrah from the Zin never mind differentiating between vineyard designations!

Okay…I’m out of exclamation points.  You get the idea.  It’s simple.  Hire people who like your wines to pour for you.  Hire people who can speak intelligently!  Treat people in your tasting room like guests.  Okay, well I guess that depends on how you have been taught to treat guests.