How to Treat Customers at Wine Tastings

Earlier this year, I celebrated another year around the sun, by driving 1.5 hours to a Boutique Winery and Restaurant.

The setting: a rural sub-tropical farm complete with grapevines, dry grass and the odd cow. The country serenity was broken only by a half dozen bothersome blowflies (But hey, this is Australia!) and the delightful conversation of our lunch guests.

Visiting a boutique winery/vineyard was exciting. I was more than ready for a filling country-style lunch and accompanying wine tasting. And, having worked for a large Australian wine operative some years back, and attending wine tastings here and there, I do feel qualified to comment on this experience.

Really, I should have raised a red flag at the sight of the sad-looking vines that appeared to be merely for decoration. Not the dinky-di thing.

It wasn’t too long before we discovered the lunch menu was profoundly limited, more of a snack food menu. I liked the sound of a grazing platter but the Man of the House, who is a hot meal/red meat and mash kind of guy, would have preferred something more hefty than salad, cold meat and cheese. (none of which he eats cold). So he went a little hungry for his birthday meal, eating just a couple of slices of bread.

NB. (the restaurant had been alerted this was a birthday celebration).

Then there were problems with the wine-tasting experience, the main attraction of having lunch at this restaurant. But not all of our party were participating in the wine tastings.

To our surprise, the staff insisted that only the ‘paying’ wine-tasting participants could sit up at the bar, ie. next to their spouses while they tasted the wines.

Non-drinking spouses, (who were the beer and mixer drinkers) were banished to remain at the allocated dining table towards the rear of the dining hut during the entire wine-tasting experience, some distance away.

This felt uncomfortable and a tad separatist. We were ostracizing our spouses and friends. This detracted significantly from our overall birthday experience.

The Wine Tasting

The wine-tasting portions offered were barely adequate. A small mouthful is not really enough to detect the full aromas, scent and taste of the wine – paying for a small mouthful of six wines.

Please note, at many other wineries, tastings are free and fulsome. Two or even three mouthfuls at least and even then, they’re still free or, of nomimal cost.

No matter how persuasive my laconic, ‘ocker’ friend was, the bar attendant flatly refused to pour more than a mouthful of wine, in his tasting glass.

Her reasoning:

“I have to be responsible with alcohol. I cannot serve more than the equivalent of one alcoholic drink, in total, for the ‘tasting experience.’

You have to be able to drive home,” she added in her husky, forthright tone.

What if you were to have an accident?” she postulated.

Explaining that we had two non-drinking guests accompanying us who could, and would be driving home and reinforced there was no way we’d be taking the wheel. But the staff member, a German exchange student, reinforcing the stereotype, stoicly refused to yield to our pleas.

“We could not have you driving on the road if you had tasted more than just one glass full in total.” {This is not their responsibility once we leave the premises}.

So.. okay. We were getting nowhere with the German.

Ten minutes later, over our lunch grazing platter snacks, our waitress asks,

“Would you like any more drinks? “

“Another glass/bottle of wine perhaps?” (Which of course, would be added to the bill).

“Yes, I will have another Shiraz, please.”

“The Shiraz? Of course!”

Huh?

Yes, we had a lovely day, thanks to our kind friends.

Due to the drawbacks cited above, we won’t return.

What Could They Do Better?

• Offer a more consistent and considerate customer service
• Double the tasting serves
• Have friendlier staff willing to share the history and development of the winery or some interesting factoid of conversation
• An expanded menu with hot options for fussy Moths. (Men of the house)

On the plus side, one of their red wines was of a reasonable quality. My friend purchased two bottles to take home.  

FYI – Fascinating correspondence received when I sent in my feedback.

“Hi Amanda,

Many thanks for your email, and taking the time to give us your feedback. We do highly value and appreciate this. We are really pleased to hear you had a lovely day and enjoy the visit and wine overall.

We recognise, and agree our food menu and some resources are very limited being a small boutique cellar door. Unfortunately, we do not have a restaurant kitchen, and so we focus on food to complement the wine being grazing platters and salads.

Expansion, and a restaurant is something we are considering in the future, but presently we only promote and cater to what we can successfully deliver in our busiest times with the facilities we have.

It is disappointing to hear you didn’t feel the wine taste volumes were sufficient. Our standard practise is to pour 6 x 25 ml equating to 1 standard glass of wine to ensure customers can monitor their wine intake. We also have an obligation to ensure we are serving alcohol responsibly by law. Whilst we practise best practice to assist customers and remain compliant,  we would have be more than happy to offer another taste as it suited on request.

We sincerely apologise your partner was unable to come up to the tasting bar, it is not intended to be rude, but have just 10 places at the bar. We do get very busy and so unfortunately have to limit these places to the guests participating in the wine tasting.

We can only apologise we did not meet your expectations on this occasion within our current business modal, but hopefully we can in the future with an expanded operation.

If there if anything we can do on the short term Amanda, please don’t hesitate to ask. We do highly value repeat business.

Kindest regards,“

My response in return:

Hi ***

Thank you for your reply and explanations.

I understand the compliance with responsible service of alcohol but wish to point out that we did explain to the bar waitress on the day that we had a designated non-drinking driver and we were not driving that day. I also wish to point out that we ordered and paid for more drinks, which was no problem. This seems to be somewhat of a contradiction in your policy. I am all for safe driving and do not drink if I am driving but it does seem terribly unfair to lump all guests in the ‘driving’ basket!

Please note my friend did in fact request another/larger serving but was told it was not possible.

FYI – I attended two wineries in other locations, recently, which was far more generous in their portions. So this was the reason we both felt the portions offered were skimpy.

Having said all of that, I simply wanted to advise you of my feelings in response to your email. I appreciate your detailed response but do not agree with your rationale. I do hope that you are able to expand the food menu in the future and wish you well in your business endeavours.

Cheers,

Amanda”

No further response was received.

This company repeatedly sends promotional advertisements to a facebook group I administer. It’s a group that has an attractively large following and ads on the group are posted for free.

Since visiting this winery, I have so far denied their posts. I don’t want to promote a place I was dissatisfied with, myself.

My Questions:

• Should I allow this winery to post free ads in my book group?
• Were my expectations of the establishment too high?

• Do wineries charge for wine tastings in your area?
• Can a restaurant call itself a restaurant, without a restaurant kitchen?

• In your opinion, what could they have done better? (besides proof-reading)

Bloggers’ Brains Trust: I would love to hear your response in the comments.

Wisdoms and Words of Inspiration

Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall.
Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, for one day ~
Robert L. Stevenson

Photo by Vodafone x Rankin everyone.connected on Pexels.com

Author Dale Carnegie commented on the high rate of hospital in-patients admitted for mental illness – almost half of all patients.

He noted:

…Too many people allow themselves to collapse under the crushing burdens of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows.

Dale Carnegie

Dale believed the cause of those crushing burdens to be the lack of awareness of living the ‘present moment.’ That is where we are living this very second you are reading this post.

It is but a small moment of time – an intersection between the millennia of the past and the future yet to be experienced.

Both Carnegie and Stevenson warn us we should accept life does not happen in the past so we cannot live there, nor can we live in the future. To attempt to do so causes anxiety and problems, which Dale believes causes issues physically and mentally.

He urges us to dispel worry about any blunders we made yesterday; to not spend those precious moments of time in a physical and mental hell by fretting about the future.

All we have is this precise moment before it slips through our fingers and is gone forever.

According to Dale, if we concentrate on living in the moment today, then better tomorrows will inevitably follow.

By all means, plan for tomorrow, he says, but do so without panic or regret.

Get the facts and push on from there.

Enjoy the good times for they never last.

Enjoy the bad times for they never last.

Thanks to Yvette from Priorhouse Blog for connecting me with the above wisdom.

Finding Time to Write and Starting NaNoWriMo

In many ways, writers live for story and we live through story. I can’t think of many jobs better than telling stories all the time. I like to think of writing as life distilled. Writers point out the moments and details of life we miss in our fast-paced society.

Writing can draw you deeper into the moment. It can help you understand people and why they do the things they do. If you want to write well, the writing itself will force you to experience your life more fully ~ Joe Bunting.

In the real world, it is stories, fictional and non-fictional, that connect us. We share friends snippets of our lives in the form of a story. Stories that motivate, amuse, anger, confront and console us, and make us smile, and possibly even help us to deal with emotions we may not know how to process.

Joining NaNoWriMo

Confession time- This month, most of my writing will contribute to NaNoWriMo, something I’ve not participated in before.

[NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month – run by a not-for-profit organization to promotes creative writing around the world].

I write professionally for work and I write for pleasure in a variety of forms. These kinds of writing pieces [Thanks Ineke for that tip] can be added to the daily word count. Which is substantial ~

50,000 words for the month of November.

Gasp!

If ever I were to write a book, writing 50,000 words in just four weeks would certainly get the project off to a flying start.

This is my motivation.

Simply talking about writing a book doesn’t cut the mustard. Talk is Talk and NaNoWriMo is about action. As editing comes later, one won’t get caught up with the finer details. Good.

The noble and neighbourly, but never ever nosy, NaNoWriMo emails have given me the following suggestions on how best to complete the writing goal, given my individual circumstances. These are the suggestions:

I. Complete two 40-minute writing sessions on weekdays = 800 words/day.

This is laughingly achievable.

Without editing, and for someone prone to rambling, 800 words is a spit in the ocean. But then, there is this:

II. Complete 6 hours of writing split between days off = 4,250 words

Potentially much more tricky! The jury’s still out on whether this is doable.

NanoWriMo’s Suggestions of getting up early to write sound fine in theory, but my mornings are way too busy.

I am up at 5, doing meditation, Yoga or Qigung, then several times a week there is walking for an hour or so and coffee, before I start work…. you get the picture. I could go all Ayurvedic and rise at 4am! Sunrise is currently around 4.45 am and the Magpies were hunting in my garden for worms at 4am this morning….hmmm.

But the NaNoWriMo team also had a good suggestion for diving right into the writing session: Leave a hook during your shorter writing sessions. Stop in the middle of a scene, or even a sentence, so that you can dive right into the thick of things when you begin again.

Questions for Bloggers

Have you ever deliberately half-finished a blog post so that you could pick it up again easily?

Did that help you dive back into writing again?

Have you ever completed NaNoWriMo?

If so, was it useful? Tips? Downsides? Upsides?

How Fiction and Writing Can Reduce Violence

“What sort of things do you write?” asked a cantankerous older gent with whom I had unhappily crossed paths with, recently.

“I write fiction and …”

“Pffft,” he huffed dismissively saying, “Fairy Stories,” and cutting me off before I could finish speaking.

We’ll come back to this obnoxious male, in a bit. First, I’ll write about the thoughts I had following this incident.

Photo by Wallace Chuck on Pexels.com

Relationships

It goes without saying that relationships are pivotal to happiness and emotional well-being.

Friends, family, community, and workplace relationships offer us quality time and companionship. We spend hours discussing and thinking about how we get along, and also when we don’t – when there is conflict or disagreements. 

Globally, conflict is an extremely serious issue, especially when nations are not able to co-exist peacefully like we are seeing in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The modern world may consider itself civilised, but are we really any kinder and more compatible than societies in our history, or is the potential for violence an inherent part of human nature we cannot shake?

The Decline of Violence

Historians insist that violence, once an important social tool for early man, is decreasing, even factoring in deaths from the Napoleonic and World Wars.*

As violence erupts in the Middle East, it is reassuring to know that statistics show homicide and violent acts have declined over the last 800 years.

* [Sidenote: The deadliest event in human history was not World War I or II, but the 13th-century conquests of Genghis Khan killing 10% of the global population at the time.]

Why Are We Violent to One Another?

In medieval times, an individual man’s importance correlated with his ability to fight. Over time, violence declined along with increased urban development and the judicial system of penalties for perpetrators of violent acts. 

Researchers have noted the bony structure of the faces of males has shortened since Prehistoric times and interestingly a longer facial structure correlates with higher testosterone levels and, thus, higher aggression. 

[Sidenote: Men, who are responsible for 90% of violent criminal acts, have been exposed to higher levels of testosterone during pre-natal or pubertal development are more likely to engage in aggression throughout their life span.]

At the social level in modern times, man’s importance can be seen to be linked more closely to the individual’s level of self-control and use of general manners.

Manners, more or less absent in medieval times, indicate personal restraint and signal a level of self-control – that means not acting on every impulse an individual feels, including violent impulses.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Developing a Sense of Morality – of Good and Bad

When it comes to violence, research reveals humans are hard-wired to be either an angel or a demon, as a behavioural survival strategy, something that was instilled in us during evolution.

But, even three-month-old babies comprehend a rudimentary sense of fairness and empathy, in controlled experiments. It could be deduced that humans develop a sense of morality, early in life. 

People switch between the two extremes, according to what the individual judges as more effective for them to use, at a particular moment in time.

Self-control and Violence

Neuroscientists have linked violent acts to an impaired function in the self-control centre of the brain, (the prefrontal cortex), as that part of the brain has been shown to function poorly in murderers, who lack self-control.

However, if the brains’ self-control centres are stimulated and non-violent neurological circuits strengthened, test subjects’ level of self-control has improved by about 30-40%, in terms of ‘behavioural intent.’

Neuroscience also indicates the pleasure centres of the brain may be activated when revenge is taken on another person. That is concerning. I see this in the schoolyard, in movies and at sporting events. I see the satisfaction some people feel when someone is served their ‘just desserts,’ – Justice by another name.

Something I found interesting when thinking about violence was the experiments on obedience to authority carried out by Stanley Milgram.

Milgram established that people will obey a directive from an authority when they believe that authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

In the experiments he conducted, he found people, paradoxically, have the capacity to be violent, given the situation, circumstance and coercion from an authority.

That’s a truly terrifying can of worms.

 

An Antidote to Violence

Can we learn something from how society changed over time? From a society where torture was an accepted legal form of punishment to societies where citizens condemn acts of horrific violence? 

Some suggest the notion of equality and human rights and literacy changed our attitude to violence. Reading encourages empathy. It raises awareness and offers different perspectives.

Words and stories allow readers to experience the thoughts, ideas and feelings of others, even fictional characters. Fiction novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin have been thought to make people more empathic. Some have even helped stoke humanitarian movements, building equality, abolishing slavery, and pushing for the advancement of human rights.

So to the ‘Cantankerous Gent,’ I met recently, Fiction is no fairy tale, so I’ll keep writing my stories, both fiction and non-fiction.

Writing Prompt – Writing a Novel

Daily Prompt: What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail?

Yep. Writing a novel is something that I would attempt if I was guaranteed not to fail.

Navigating either the publishing moghuls, the process or the self-publishing quagmire is challenging. It is easy to procrastinate.

Writing a novel is a huge undertaking of time and energy and I have little experience in the area, other than my blog, essays and various published articles.

And yet, my ideas bucket overflows.

It just doesn’t ever convert into hard copy. Instead, the ideas remain consigned to the crepuscular ether of potential possibilities that never achieve fruition.

It is mildly frustrating. A ‘gonna’ job. I am gonna do this and then gonna do that. You get what I mean?

I have so many ideas for fiction and non-fiction books. Helpful bloggers like Yvette from Priorhouse blog, even sent me a handy template to follow, to get me started.

And I did try. I have a book half finished with another blogger from a decade ago, and loads of ideas that are just in their infancy, but entirely possible and plausible.

Do they ever move past that point?

No, they do not.

Failure before they have even begun!

But y’know, there is always tomorrow.

What about you? Have you written a book or novel?

How long did it take?

What motivations did you need to keep you on track?

Wordless Wednesday

Autumn Leaves and Revisiting Germany

As Autumn approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, I am reminded that I live in the tropics where there is no Autumn as such. Very few trees lose leaves, unless they are ornamentals. To see them we need to travel much further south.

It is a special beauty that comes with the ‘fall’ season – I can’t get used to calling it that. The very word Autumn sounds earthy, evocative of russet, brown and golden yellows, colours that feature in the distant North.

Thirteen Years of Blogging

As this blog is now Thirteen years old, I thought I’d revisit one of the posts relating to that time and add some reflections.

Thirteen years ago, I was sipping a cup of silky-smooth, decadent hot chocolate for a minimal price at the Rathaus Cafe in Offenbach, Germany.

I remember glancing at the temperature gauge, noting it was zero degrees Celsius. Outside, I studied a squirrel as he scurried around the branches of a large weeping tree. Having only seen a squirrel in TV cartoons, I was fascinated. The creatures I was familiar with at home had pouches that held their young and bounced around on two legs using their thick tails as levers.

The squirrel’s stage was fast losing the remainder of its pugnacious, golden-brown, autumnal leaves, a slowly wilting sentinel, witnessing the imminent passing of its foliage’s use-by-date.

To some, it was just a tree in a not-so-unique village in Germany. To me, this tree was like a wrinkled, weathered face: elegant, wise and experienced in its maturity and so very different from anything back home.

It wasn’t just magnificent; this tree had history. It provided shade and shelter; it emanated clean air, as all large trees do and contrasted ever so softly with the harsh lines of the historically significant structures around it.

This majestic beast framed the entrance of a park adjacent to the white neo-baroque manor house that, to me, resembled what I imagined to be a ‘Von Trap,’ style mansion. Having just arrived from the subtropical heat of a humid Australian city, I thought I had stepped into heaven!

Busing Palais in Offenbach

The Busing Palais in Offenbach was home to 18th-century entrepreneurs Peter Bernard and Johann Georg d’Orville, and the likes of Goethe would spend summers there. All but destroyed in 1943, this manor house was rebuilt to become a Museum, Library and of late, a conference centre.

Busing Palais Offenbach

Not only that but a Scloss, or Castle and Chapel completed a heritage square nearby.

Offenbach

As much as I enjoyed the architecture, the Festival of Leaves around me was the real jewel in the crown.

Proverbial Friday – Hate

Bringing back the old Proverbial Friday post – this quote is on hate and was prompted by the short story on the Discussion Group I posted.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding ~

Tennessee Williams