I have a role that puts me in contact with winery owners, analysts, entrepreneurs and occasionally even people with checkmarks next to their Twitter accounts. They run the gamut. I get a couple hundred emails a day - most of them junk but more than enough to have me working 12 hour days to keep up. People are always asking my opinion, and on occasion, they want to give me their opinion.

This week I received an email from a casual acquaintance who is a wine consumer but likes to read the SVB State of the Industry Report and check in every year with me. This year his email was disturbing. Here is what he said almost verbatim. I've changed the region to 'wine country' to make it more general and added emphasis:

The Email 

Hi Rob,

(Deleted small talk about the SVB annual report) 

A funny thing happened during my most recent visit to wine country.  This was the fourth year of an annual father/daughter wine trip.  Our daughter's the type of person the industry should be watching for; 39, a successful professional, and an early collector. 

 We had a good time, but on our flight back to Chicago she shocked me by saying 'Dad, let's stop these trips.  We were treated better in every restaurant and retailer than we were in any of the wineries. And many of them obviously didn't give a (expletive deleted) we were even there, let alone that we were Club members.  Let's do the Grand Canyon next winter.'

Yep -- we're doing the Grand Canyon in winter rather than going back to wine country! 

I fully realize as a consumer/collector I'm not on anyone's radar and certainly no 'whale' in any way, but we focused on reserve wines, bought at every winery and did drop over $10,000 in total.  My daughter noted 'that's probably negligible in this great economy'.  As an aging Boomer, well out of the 1%, I hadn't considered that. 

As I thought about it, I had to agree with our daughter's analysis. We had 15 visits;  every one with an appointment set many weeks in advance.  Four had no record of our reservations while others had it for the wrong time or type of tasting.  Only two had bothered to look at what we had bought from them in the past.  Only once were we met by the person we were told would be meeting us.  Several set us down with a glass and a bottle and walked off -- only to reappear while bruskly asking 'you want to taste something else now?'  

She said she only felt truly welcome at three places.  She was also, in her own words 'royally pissed off' when we were presented with our invoices at several locations only to see hundreds of dollars listed as our 'suggested tip' based on our case purchases.  I told her it might be a new approach to generating fee income.  She said it made her feel even more inadequate as a customer and certainly less comfortable recommending wine country as a place for colleagues and friends to visit. She also noted, which I had missed, not a single winery thanked us for being a club member or allocation customer.

I seriously believe something is broken when the Inn bellhops and housekeepers are nicer to you than are the winery staffers.  When presenting pitches to buy wines above $50 per bottle and sometimes well above that, the quality of your sales staff is actually important whether ownership supports its need in their business model or not.  I worked my early career with Control Data.  I know the mighty might not think it, but they can fall.

Read the rest here.