Brian doesn’t even seem to have reached the issue of what the compensation will be - the winery is denying any responsibility for the quality of its product . . . whether it can provide him a replacement of the same kind, versus some alternative, and whether that’s “fair” is a secondary question it seems.
I’m surprised nobody has even guessed as to the winery in question, I know there has to be some WB’ers out their sleuthing this more than I have! ![[winner.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/07ec25c9fd71159fe15d7f1ba5fad64e91238d0e.gif "winner"){kind=small}
it’s pretty easy to guess, but given Brian’s intent to keep it anonymous i’ll keep my mouth shut.
Let’s see, the hints are:
Winery recently changed ownership
Winemaker has been on vacation or away from the winery recently
Tasting Room Manager is a woman
URL is …wines.com
Let’s not Out the winery, please. I’m sure Brian can let them know in a more subtle way that they need to address their policy.
I don’t think any of us owe the winery any loyalty at all. Brian is the one here whom we should respect. I get that he doesn’t want the winery outed at this point, and I respect that. If outing the winery in some way caused Brian some trouble, that’s a great reason not to out it.
If outing the winery would cause the winery some trouble, but wouldn’t bother Brian, then I don’t know why we should in any way feel protective of the winery.
I purchased a magnum of Produttori Barbaresco Normale from Vinopolis and it was corked but never said anything to them. Maybe I should have, but they are on the other side of the country and I chalked it up to sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t.
I’m also not going to speculate (though I guess I asked a question that would stir that, not my intention but I see where I may have offended Brian) either though I have a few in mind.
I had a friend jump on my allocation one time, and one of the bottles he got was corked. It was some time later before I heard the story, but apparently he reached out to the winery and wanted his money back, or a new bottle, or something. Sounds like they exchanged words. Winery made him send the bottle and the cork, and then they tested it. Finally agreed with him, but did not have any more of what he ordered. I think he finally got a different vintage. Part of the arguing was that he did not buy it directly from them, but went through my allocation, although I don’t think he divulged my name (he said he didn’t, but I sometimes wonder).
I will neither confirm nor deny any guesses so they will remain just that, guesses.
The point of the thread was to discuss whether any of you have experienced similar situations. As for the ones in question simply supplying them with a link to this thread is all I would do. Hearing from representatives of your customer base anonymously should help stir conversation internally about whether the policy is fair or not.
I’ve always called them and asked them if they want me to mail the cork back. It’s the cork that gets tested in my understanding…but if they offer a refund, I’ll follow whatever policy they have. Some say no, some offer a credit, and some don’t respond or delay until you go away. I’ve stopped buying from the last ones.
I know this isn’t the case here, but consider another perspective. At the distribution company I worked for, we had an agreement with most wineries that we would take a small percentage off of our invoice to cover their portion of samples and any bad bottles. So if one of our retail/restaurant customers returned a bad bottle to us, it went no further. So a winery replacing a bottle that was purchased through the distribution channel would effectively be paying more than once for the same bad bottle. It’s not always as simple as saying the winery is the source so they should replace. On the other hand, if I’m the winery and a customer comes directly to me, I’m making them whole. There’s too many wineries to choose from and I could take it up with the distributor for an adjustment etc.
Those are smart wineries. I can’t see taking it back to to a retailer that probably won’t have a record of the purchase and may not be the retailer you bought it from anyway. Who even knows what’s in the bottle you’re trying to return. But if it’s really a cork problem, the winery should want to know. They put a defective product into the stream of commerce and nobody will ever know until the customer opens the bottle.
I’m not even blaming the wineries, because they certainly don’t want to get bad corks. But they need to be able to tell their suppliers that they received crap and the only way to help them do that is to let them know that a bottle was bad. I’ve never encountered a winery that didn’t care. I have encountered retailers who received motor oil and all kinds of other horrid shit in bottles that people tried to return as “bad wine”.
i skimmed the thread quickly, but was it really noted that the TRM is a woman?
Nope, you’re right – I either had had too much wine or had something else on my mind when I wrote that. For some reason I thought Brian said “she” when he described the situation, but looking back I see I just invented that.
Interesting, I hadn’t considered that possibility. In my limited (2 bottles) experience, I’ve had better luck returning corked bottles to the winery than to the retailer. These were US wines and had been purchased years prior to opening. In one case I wasn’t even sure where I’d purchased the bottle.
Nick Peay did the same for me, and I didn’t even claim the wine was corked!..Just with less flavor than I’d expected.
Some businesspeople understand customer relations, and some don’t.
And by the way, I didn’t purchase the bottle from the winery, it was from a wine bar in Charleston. Nick just read my CT tasting note and took it upon himself to hunt me up.
Another good example of customer service: One bottle in one of my Nicora orders had no label. I contacted Nick Elliott, just wanting to know which wine it was. He sent me a replacement bottle gratis even though I didn’t ask for another one.
In my experience the vast majority of winemakers want to keep their customers happy and will go to great lengths to do so. In an age with few true craftsmen, they take old-fashioned pride in their work, and stand behind it. So now I, too, am anxious to find out which winery won’t stand behind its wine. ![[popcorn.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/1/1ca9f29573458cca2424a66a50d6c1261081dd3e.gif "[popcorn.gif]"){kind=small}
Similarly, I was talking with John Westerhold and lamented that I had pobega’d a bottle of his pinot right out of the shipping crate and that it seemed like it was a little “asleep” from transport and he comped me a new bottle without me even asking, my next shipment from him just came with one with a note attached.
That’s a bit of a leap. The fault is more likely to be with a poorly-trained Tasting Room Manager.
I stand corrected. I am anxious to find out which winery does not properly train its staff. 