Wine Experiences: What do YOU value most?

If you read most anything about the wine industry these days you can’t miss the word ‘experience’ or ‘experiential’.  Everyone has decided they need to make wine ‘an experience’ to attract the Millennials of the world, who are basically shunning wine over other forms of alcohol and in some locations recently legalized recreational cannabis.   

This issue of experience was especially on display for us when I began booking visits for an upcoming trip to Napa wineries (watch this space for more on this).  Every winery I read about wanted us to come to ‘experience’ their winery.  Surprisingly many of these wineries’ offerings placed actually tasting their wines as secondary to other aspects of a visit.  Plus if that didn’t entice me enough, I found offer after offer to join them on some type of wine trip, cruise, or adventure. 

Now I’m all for adventure and having solid experiences at wineries we visit.  We enjoy many of the enhanced tastings now offered, which pair high quality food with the local wines.  Tours are always enjoyed, which is why we are not huge fans of the explosion of tasting rooms.  And while I may be in the minority on this one, but cruises are not my thing since I have to decide how I want to spend my wine money – buy a cruise or buy more wines.  So each of these aspects of a wine marketing are important, they are not why I go.

I go to learn about the wine and its people.  Now comes the most important thing: I stay, become, and remain a customer and/or club member because of the customer service I receive.

Surveys abound showing the importance of customer service and its kissing cousin correcting mistakes.  No matter the experience at the winery if the customer service we receive is lacking the message to us is evident: ‘we don’t really care about your business’.  Ditto for post-purchase error resolution.  If a winery doesn’t care about the service they provide to correct a failure, we get the same message ‘we really don’t care about having you as a customer’. 

Perhaps business is just too good in the wine business these days. Maybe losing a customer and/or wine club member is no big deal since there are long waiting lists of prospects waiting to buy.  Could be the profit margins on Napa wines are so high many folks don’t care about selling to smaller customers.  Then again it might be a case where demand is so high for the product there is no need to market since it just sells itself.

Sadly for some reason we are seeing a noticeable degradation in the level of customer service in many of the wineries and wine clubs where we are members.  In the years we have been wine club customers I have never experienced the amount of bad customer service we’ve recently been receiving.  If wine club members are truly some of a winery’s most valuable customers this is a troubling trend.   

In just the past few months we have experienced:

• Buying a specific wine only to open the carton upon receipt to find different wines;
• Having belonged for years to a ‘reds only’ wine club, open the club shipment and find it half white;
• Belonging to a wine club offering the ability to customize to again receive the standard wines and not those chose and paid for;
• Spending months, almost a year’s worth, trying to get a winery to correct their error;
• Being told to ship erroneous wines back to the winery when it’s clearly illegal for me to ship wine without a license;
• Being told a shipping/receiving problem was my error when a simple check of the tracking number for the shipment shows the winery sent my order to a state and address I’ve neither lived at nor ever entered in my account;
• Continually surprised so many wineries have basically quit communicating with their existing customers/club members except to send their ‘it’s time to buy our wine’ emails;
• Buying wine at a small winery, giving them our email address, phone, and more, yet never being communicated with again; and
• Being instructed ‘Don’t email. We lose emails. Text us.’ only to then text and be told ‘Why did you text?  Send us an email.’  

I fully understand and appreciate everyone is human and mistakes get made.  I make many myself, but when it’s a trend I’m definitely detecting a message.  This message has been received and as a result we now belong to three fewer wine clubs and have informed four other wineries we will no longer be a customer.

Given our concerns it will be even more interesting than usual to listen to Rob McMillan, EVP and Founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s Wine Division during his upcoming annual State of the Wine Industry videocast tomorrow (01-14-2020) at 9:00 am PST.  You can register by clicking here.