This Week

After the Season

The guests who walk in once the crowds leave, in wine country and on the other side of the world

This issue is about the people who show up after the season ends. In the Northern Hemisphere that means November, a half-lit tasting room, and the members who drive out anyway. The story is a Thursday afternoon in Dry Creek Valley that cost a winery a case, set beside a night in 1974 that kept a Colorado hotel in business for fifty years. Readers in Hawke’s Bay, Mendoza, the Barossa, and the Western Cape are heading into spring, and a short section looks at their season alongside the harvest tables of Croatia and Georgia.

Stories  ·  Tasting Room

The Last Guests of the Season

A founding member, a quiet room in Dry Creek Valley, and the Colorado hotel that got the same afternoon right

The room was empty when I walked in, which in Dry Creek Valley on a Thursday afternoon in November is not unusual, and I was glad of it. I have been a founding member of this winery’s club for years. I had missed the pickup party the month before and hadn’t tasted the new releases, and I wanted to taste them from the standard flight, so I could hear what the room was telling people who didn’t already love the place. I said all of that to the host, who was new to me. He nodded, slid a printed tasting sheet across the counter, the kind with a paragraph of notes under each wine, and poured the rosé.

Six wines. The rosé, then a Zinfandel, a Pinot, a Malbec, a Cabernet, and some bubbles to finish. With each one he read me the paragraph off the sheet, quickly, in the voice of a man who had read that paragraph fifty times that week, and then went back to the far end of the counter where he had a book open face down. When my glass got low he came back, poured, read, and returned to the book. He never asked what I’d made of last year’s Zin, or which of the new ones I’d been waiting for, though I had told him at the door exactly why I was there. I had come in to buy, a case split between the Zin and the Cab.

Insights  ·  How-To

The Slow-Season Shift

How tasting rooms and hotel front desks can be ready for the guests who come after the crowds leave

The new Insights post is about the guests who come in on a quiet off-season afternoon. It covers reading the club roster or the arrivals report before the doors open, having a missed shipment pulled and waiting before the member arrives, asking what brought someone in and letting the answer change the visit, and putting the people who like strangers on the quiet shifts. The same steps work in a restaurant dining room on a slow Tuesday.

Classes  ·  Front Line Mondays

The Guest in Front of You

A staff class for anyone in a guest-facing hospitality role, in Reno and online

Front Line Mondays is a series of 90-minute classes for the people who meet the guest first: tasting room hosts, servers, bartenders, and front desk staff. The first class covers how to read a guest in the first minute after they walk in, and how to tell the story of the place in the host’s own words so it doesn’t sound memorized. It is a working class with practice in the room, and nobody needs to prepare anything. Each class stands on its own, so an owner or manager can send one person or the whole team.

The in-person series continues in January.

Around the World

The Season, Elsewhere

Cellar doors opening for spring in the south, and harvest tables in Croatia and Georgia

While tasting rooms in Sonoma County and Burgundy settle into their quiet months, cellar doors in Hawke’s Bay, the Barossa, Mendoza, and the Western Cape are heading into spring. Their first guests look a lot like November’s last ones up north: members who waited out the winter for the new releases, locals getting in before the visitors arrive, and people who planned a trip around one producer, usually greeted by staff hired for the season a week or two earlier. The same habits apply. Read the member list before opening, ask what brought each guest in, and tell them what happened in the vineyard over the winter.

In eastern Croatia, the town of Ilok and the Osijek-Baranja County tourist board took two of the nineteen Iter Vitis Awards this month, given by the Council of Europe cultural route devoted to wine heritage. Ilok won for the way it ties its wine to its cultural heritage, and the county won for Vinski mjesec, its month of wine events. Most travelers know Croatia for the Dalmatian coast, where Zinfandel has its roots, but both awards went to Slavonia, on the Danube, where Graševina covers the hills.

In Georgia, the rtveli, the grape harvest, has mostly finished in Kakheti and runs on into November and later in the western regions. Each day of it ends with the family and whoever came to help sitting down at a long table for a supra, and Georgians have a saying that a guest is a gift from God. Both countries are on my list to visit in the coming year, and interviews from Georgia are in the works for Meet the Winemakers.

The Numbers

7 of 10

The most popular luxury destinations for 2027 that are in Europe, according to Virtuoso’s new Luxe Report, drawn from more than 3,100 travel advisors in more than 50 countries. Japan took the top spot, with Italy, France, Greece, and Spain close behind.

597

Entries in this year’s Best Of Wine Tourism Awards across the eleven Great Wine Capitals, from the Clare Valley to the Douro, all judged against one shared set of criteria.

7%

Drop in UK hotel and restaurant job openings over the past year, to 70,000, according to the Office for National Statistics. Average weekly pay in the sector fell 1.4 percent, its first annual decline in more than two and a half years.

Worth Reading

Global Honours in the 2027 Best Of Wine Tourism Awards

Great Wine Capitals, October 22

Eleven wine tourism businesses took global titles at the close of the conference in Hawke’s Bay, one from each member region, including Beaulieu Vineyard in Napa Valley, Quinta da Vacaria in the Douro, Casa Drummond by Bodega Trivento in Mendoza, and Paulett Wines in the Clare Valley, whose Bush deVine restaurant won for its food. The list works as a travel map for anyone planning a trip, and as a picture of what the best cellar doors are being measured against for anyone running one.

Ask George: Should Restaurants Still Have a Person Answering the Phone?

St. Louis Magazine, October 23

St. Louis Magazine’s dining editor and his team weigh in on automated phone lines. Most of them are fine with a recording for hours and directions and want a person on the line for anything else, such as an allergy, a change to a large party, or a bottle sent to a friend’s table. For a restaurant, an inn, or a tasting room, the first conversation with a guest often happens on the phone, days before anyone walks in.

Hospitality Wages Fall for First Time in Over Two Years

Restaurant Online, October 21

Pay and job openings in UK hotels and restaurants are both falling, and the accountant quoted in the piece reads it partly as operators running leaner and partly as businesses priced out of hiring. The UK Budget is due the day this issue goes out, with the trade asking for relief on payroll costs. Smaller teams make the question in this week’s Insights, about who works the quiet shifts, harder to answer anywhere.

Meet the Winemakers  ·  For the Host

Joel Peterson, Once & Future Wine

Asked what someone pouring his wine for a stranger needs to know that isn’t in the tasting notes, Joel Peterson said the guest should come to it with an open mind, because the wine is his translation of a vineyard, and a taster who pays attention can find the place in it. Peterson founded Ravenswood in 1976 and now makes old-vine Zinfandel at Once & Future in Sonoma Valley.

Meet the Winemakers is an oral history series with winemakers around the world. Winemakers who want to take part can book an hour.