Winery Customer Service?

I had an offer to purchase a winter release from a winery in California whose waiting list I had been on for about a year. I won’t name the winery, but I had tasted a couple of their pinots and found them quite interesting.

I got on their site and went through the ordering process only to find that they do not ship to Indiana. I sent them a nicely worded email letting them know that wine shipping laws in Indiana have changed recently and that many more wineries are now shipping to Indiana. Here is the text of the message I received in return:

Mr. Platt,

We are sorry that we are unable to ship XXX wines to Indiana. XXX would be happy to hold your wine purchase up to 30 days at the winery for pickup.

As a reminder, if you do not accept your XXX winter release allocation by February 12th it will be offered to others on the list. Please act quickly as supply is limited.

Though not overtly rude the response does seem rather terse in this age of ample wine buying opportunity. I have run into this issue in the past and the wineries typically go overboard in apologizing and explaining why they cannot ship to Indiana. A couple have even offered to ship to surrounding states for pickup.

At the very least they should have identified the shipping restriction before I went through the entire profile setup and payment information process. I won’t be buying any of this producers wines any time soon.

Sounds like an automated response. I wonder if a live human being even looked at your email?

w/r/t your overall issue: ...there is a lot of good to decent wine out there. If employees seem stressed and unhappy, Or are snobby and pretentious. Why will I buy wine from that winery? There are always other wineries

[Jenise]

Yeah, very boiler plate. Sounds like the winery just hasn't updated itself on the changes in Indiana, and you need to contact a real human to let them know what it's in their best interests to find out.

You may be right, Brian. They may just have a "no ship state" canned e-mail that gets spammed out. I will take my $150+ elsewhere.

I will say that kind of treatment is the exception, not the rule. Most wineries bend over backward to be helpful. They will waive shipping, send an extra bottle and take wines back without question in an effort to keep me happy. Customer service at wineries and wine retailers has come a long way over the past 10 years.