What Makes a Great Winery Experience? Part One
This is a question that winery managers and marketing professionals ask us all the time. Running a tour company offers us some insights; we hear client impressions every day, so we’re happy to offer our suggestions. We know that the better the visitor’s wine country experience, the better chance that they will return and repeat clients are golden.
With that in mind I’m offering some ideas and insights about wine tourism, both locally and globally. Some of them will be immediately helpful to people in the field, while others may just make you think. Let’s start right in my local neighborhood with something to think about.
If Napa County would like to do one thing to improve their local job market and cut down on traffic while increasing business, they can do one thing; repeal the regulations that deny wineries the right to sell food and provide picnic areas to their guests. A very small number of wineries have that right due to various reasons, but the number of wineries in comparison to the volume of visitors to the valley is way out of proportion. Even for experienced tour guides it makes finding a nice place to picnic a veritable art. This might have made sense when the regulations went into place, the number of visitors was much smaller, but today it is counter-productive.
This would help reduce one of the biggest problems, traffic! A big part of that congestion is people rushing to the few places where they can get picnic supplies and then to available tables. If more wineries offer food and picnic tables people won’t have to scurry around clogging the roads. The other day I read that V. Sattui gets 400,000 visitors each year. Bordeaux France only gets 700,000 wine visitors for the whole region. Now Dario makes a nice bottle of wine but it’s his deli (the only one in the valley with picnic tables nearby) and the chance to have lunch with a bottle of wine, that packs them in. Many days you can’t find an empty table there.
How about sharing the wealth a little and get those hungry tourists off the road and into the wineries. That way people can buy a bottle of wine to share with lunch and deepen their relationship with the winery and the valley. In the short term it would make the whole winery experience nicer and in the long term, it is the depth of relationships that keep people coming back.
Ralph & Lahni de Amicis are authors of the Amicis Winery Guides, and owners of Amicis Tours. They are authors of over twenty books on health, design, business and travel. Their book ‘Guidelines for the Hospitality Professional’ teaches the unique art of creating great wine tours. Their articles and products can be found on the sites http://www.amicistours.com and http://www.spaceandtime.com
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