I recently had the opportunity to escape the cold w/ a quick-ish trek to Northern California w/ my wife and our favorite ‘drinking’ couple. On somewhat short notice, and in no small part to my seriously fantastic mother-in-law who volunteered to take care of our three kids, we grabbed a mid-day bird to San Francisco with a plan of spending a day covering as much ground in the city as possible and then heading up to Napa for two days of wine appointments and a bit of R&R. I’m going to tell you a bit about our trek, but before I get started, I want you all to know that I am most certainly not, and will never claim to be, any kind of travel writer. I will do my best to be short and sweet and hopefully share with you some things I learned and observed that we can apply at Barriques to help make it a better business.

We arrived in San Fran late on a Thursday night and were staying at the downtown Hilton. Tired and thoroughly famished, we took the concierges advice and hit up a place called First Crush, right around the corner from hotel. As I had previously stated, we were traveling w/ our favorite ‘drinking couple’, named as such for the propensity of the 4 of us mutually encouraging each other to consume far more adult beverages then is certainly necessary when we go out. We did a fine job living up to those expectations that night and fell into bed anticipating the day ahead. The time change gave me the muscle to get up very early despite the previous nights festivities and I cruised over to a near by Peets coffee for some caffeine. 5:30 in the morning and I was greeted by big smile and two big cups of hot brown water to blow the cob webs away. For the rest of the day we walked our way around the city, first taking the trolley from the Powell & Market turntable all the way over to Fisherman’s Warf. I know what your are thinking, what a bunch of tourists. But alas, I was under orders from my train loving 7 year old that if I didn’t get some footage of us riding a trolley he was going to be ticked. So we trollied. We used our feet from there basically burning most of the day meandering back towards the general direction of our hotel. As a retailer, I marveled at the gazillion little trinkets on display in some of the storefronts in China town, not because there were a gazillion of them, but because I didn’t see so much as a speck of dust on anything. Seriously, what did they do w/ the dust?
That night, we got a very lucky 6:30 reservation at The Slanted Door down in the Ferry Building and had a great, great dining experience. The Riesling/German dominated wine list was like reading greek to me but we got some great advice from the wine steward and had a great time. I heartily recommend a visit to The Slanted Door if you are in the area. After a quick drink at the Water Bar we called it a night.

Saturday, we drove up to Napa with a fairly full day of wine appointments ahead of us.

First stop was Artesa: We had no ‘air cover’ and practically busted down the gates being the first customers of the day. They have a beautiful facility, were very gracious, and their deck over looking their vineyards was a great, realaxing intro to the day ahead. Oh yeah, the wines were pretty ok as well.
Louis Martini was next: We have carried the Louis Martini Napa Cab at Barriques for years and always thought it was one of the best deals in Cali Cab for the price. We were treated like rockstars by our host, Jordan, had a great lunch and discovered a new winery of theirs, Ghost Pines, that we subsequently brought into the stores for a tasting last week. Great visit.
Grgich was stop three: I was pretty psyched about this visit. Our distributor has been hammering Finn to pick up their wines. I think we arrived just after a large bachelor and bachelorette party took over the tasting room so the place was a zoo. There was some mix up w/ our appointment, but no matter, they got us setup to taste some wines and away we went. Unfortuantely, our host was a bit of a ‘hater’ and it tainted our experience quite a bit. Plus, I’ll admit, for the prices the wines just didn’t wow me.
Last, on to Plump Jack: Let’s see, 70 degrees, cloudless day, 3 wineries and probably 30 wines under our belt. How could we not like Plump Jack? It is a small, quant facility, perfect for our last stop for the day.

Compliments of the recession, we were staying the night in Yountville at the Vintage Inn. That night we grabbed a fun dinner at Mustards Grill and again crashed early. Sunday we were similarly booked up but I kicked off the morning right w/ an early visit to Bouchon Bakery right across the street. I chatted up the folks manning the ovens, and came back to our room with 9 peoples worth of pastries that my wife and I sat around and gnawed on until we headed over to Joseph Phelps for our first meeting.

Joseph Phelps: I’ll admit it, Master Somelier Claude, our host, scared the sh*t out of me at first. However, he quickly showed his soft side and, being Belgian, told some great jokes at the expense of the French and conducted us through a very formal tasting process. In the end, we all came away having had a great experience. Claude was a great teacher.
Round two, Quintessa: I’d been here before but I wanted my fellow travelers to witness the James Bond-esque winery. Amazing what one wine can support.
Frank Family was next on the list: This is another one that I was really looking forward to. Our experience at Frank Family was, well…a bit of a freakshow(ask me about it sometime), but in a good way. They make some great wine, and in fact, it was the only place I actually took a bottle home from. Dennis, our host was funny, genuine and quite a character.
Last on the docket was Schramsberg: Well, it was going to be Schramsberg, but to be honest, we were all very ‘wined’ out so we skipped it.
That night we actually switched hotels to the Villagio, the sister property to the Vintage right down the road. Why bother? I suppose it was somewhat due to a hysterical(for my wife and I) experience our friends had w/ a bat at 2am, that decided to climb out of the tv cabinet in their room and proceed to tormenting them for the better part of an hour until it was ‘shooed’ out the night before. Thus, we moved.
For dinner that night, with the help from the folks at Frank Family, we got a seat at the relatively new restaurant, Bottega, brainchild of Napa Style chef Michael Chiarello. Good stuff and even got to meet the man himself midway through our dinner.
Monday was travel day. We lollygaged away the morning, zoomed back down to San Fran, hopped on a plane and headed back to reality.

So here are a couple of my thoughts, take-aways and to-dos from our adventure:

Are you sustainable, I’m sustainable, Let’s be sustainable – During our second day of winery visits as soon as our host started to get the words “horns of manure” out of her mouth I said ‘Woah!’ No more horns, no more manure! W/ one exception every place that we visited harped on the fact that they were far down the path of farming either organically and/or biodynamically. Biodynamic farming in particular, was on the tip of every wineries tongue that we visited. There is a bit of hocus-pocus about some of the practices(100% my opinion) but, in general, this is a great trend that is healthier for them and healthier for the consumer. But boy, I was I tired of hearing about burying cows heads and spraying poop all over the vineyard. In the process of doing some research before I left, I happened up this very well written biodynamic FAQ from Grgich that is a great primer on biodynamic farming. If, you want a bit more cynical take, check out one of my favorite wine blogs, Vinography for his take. Either way, it brought to the surface a longstanding issue we have had at Barriques that we need to finally solve once and for all, the issue of how we can better communicate in our stores, whether a wine is organically or biodynamically produced.

The service industry is capable of great acts of service – I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but it was at dinner on our last night at San Francisco at The Slanted Door and somewhere mid-way through our meal I asked my gang, ‘have you guys noticed how great the service has been at all the places we had eaten over past day?”. I wasn’t just talking about at the relatively expensive Slanted Door where it should be(and was) but at the not-so expensive restaurant we ate at the night before, at 5:30 am where I was first customer in line at the Peets coffee, at lunch that day, everywhere. The longer that we have been in our business at Barriques, most certainly a service business, the more it bothers me when I hear about Barriques giving less then great service and when I hear people bashing the service industry in general, for providing bad service. Barriques has some great ‘service providers’ w/ in our company and although some element of customer service training has always been part of our orientation process for our new people I think we need to do some more dedicated training to make sure we are always delivering a great experience.

It is hard to find ‘value’ wines in Napa - By ‘value’ I mean inexpensive, not, good value for the dollar. I know you can find them but you really, really have to try. My winery choices clearly were going to make it hard from the start, but in the process of planning where I was going to go, I’ll be honest, I came up w/ very few places that actual sell ‘value’ wines and that make their way into into Wisconsin. In fact, of the 60 – 70 wines we tried I can only think of only 2 or 3 that would retail for less then $20! Given what is happening in the wine market right, now I would be shaking in my boots if all I had in my portfolio were wines retailing for more then $30. Who is buying that stuff?

That’s it. I’d love to hear any comments or questions and thanks for listening.

-MRW