This Week

When Nobody From the Winery Is in the Room

What a stranger hears about a wine depends on whoever happens to be working that night

This issue is about the people who end up telling a place’s story without anyone asking them to. The story is a casino steakhouse bar in Northern Nevada, where the only wine teacher the bartenders ever had was a distributor rep with a laminated sheet, and two sentences about Anderson Valley fog sold a bottle nobody had ordered. For hoteliers, the piece that runs only in this email is about the one question I ask the front desk at an airport hotel in Sonoma County every time I check in, and Around the World goes to Yangon, where a Thai hotel group just took over a 125-year-old grand hotel and promised to leave most of it alone. Insights takes the same idea to the tasting room counter in December. This issue also starts The Second Glass, a new weekly feature that picks up where Come Over October left off, and Tom Croghan of The Vineyards at Dodon has the best answer yet to the question of where to start with someone who knows nothing about wine.

Stories  ·  Restaurants

Two Sentences About the Fog

A casino steakhouse bar where the distributor rep was the only wine teacher, and a Pinot Noir nobody had ordered

The steakhouse is at the back of a casino in Northern Nevada, past the slot banks and a craps table where a man in a Raiders jacket was having a much better Thursday than the rest of the building. Its bar runs along one wall under amber light that makes every glass look expensive. I sat down a little after seven, ordered a glass of red off the by-the-glass list, and asked the bartender what she would pour for herself if it were her night off.

She thought about it longer than most people do, which I liked, and then pointed at the Napa Cabernet I already had in front of me, which had so much new oak in it I half expected a splinter. She said it was the best seller and that the rep who carried it had come in over the summer and poured it for the staff before a shift. Tucked against the register was a laminated sheet he had left behind, and under the Cabernet it said smooth, bold, approachable.

Only in the Newsletter  ·  For Hoteliers

Where Would You Send Me?

The question I ask the front desk at an airport hotel in Sonoma County every time I check in

When I’m working in Sonoma County, I usually stay at the Hilton Garden Inn out by the Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport, between Santa Rosa and Windsor. It is not the kind of hotel that ends up in a magazine. It has an indoor pool, a grill off the lobby, a free shuttle to the airport, and rates that let me keep coming back, which I do often enough that I’ve stopped looking anywhere else when I book.

Every time I check in, I ask the person at the front desk the same question. Where would you send me for an experience I couldn’t find on my own? I don’t ask for the best winery in the county, because everybody already has a list of those. I want to know where they would send a friend who was in town for one afternoon.

The answer usually comes from someone who lives in the county and has opinions about it, which is more than a rack of brochures by the elevator can offer. The last time I asked, the answer was Raymond Burr.

Raymond Burr Vineyards is out on West Dry Creek Road in the Dry Creek Valley, on land the actor who played Perry Mason farmed with his partner, Robert Benevides. Burr died in 1993, and Benevides named the vineyard for him afterward. I had been there before, and I went again anyway, on the strength of that one answer from the front desk. It turned into a terrific afternoon, and that one is a story for another day.

An airport hotel like this one has no concierge and no wine program. What it has is a front desk staffed by people who live in the county, and most of them know a place a guest would never find on a phone. Most guests never ask, and most desk staff are never told that answering is part of the job. I keep booking the same hotel, and that question is a good part of the reason.

Insights  ·  How-To

The Guest Who Came for the Company

What a host can say to the person at the edge of the group who didn’t pick the winery

Between now and New Year’s, a good share of the people at a tasting room counter came along with the office party or a visiting sister-in-law, and the quiet one at the edge of the group usually decides when everyone heads for the parking lot. The new Insights post covers what to teach in a ten-minute pre-shift huddle: spot that guest, give them one true story about the place that has nothing to do with chemistry, and ask something anyone can answer. It also covers what to put in their hand besides a glass, from water poured without being asked to a nonalcoholic option offered with a story behind it.

The Second Glass  ·  November

This is the first installment of a feature that will run every week, here and in Pour Story Society. It takes its spirit from Karen MacNeil, who started Come Over October in 2024 with Kimberly Charles and Gino Colangelo to get people inviting friends over to share a bottle, in answer to the growing pressure on wine from Sober October and the anti-alcohol movement. This year’s campaign just wrapped, and I want to thank Karen for three years of carrying that message for everyone who makes, pours, and sells wine.

The Second Glass is my part of it, for the other eleven months. Each month has one question, and each week asks it a little differently.

Who did the work this year and won’t be at your table?

At The Vineyards at Dodon in Maryland, when the last grapes come off the crush pad, Tom Croghan and his vineyard manager sing the Ban Bourguignon, the Burgundian drinking song an intern from Meursault taught them about ten years ago. His wife and his general manager can’t stand it. Then the whole team sits down to a post-harvest party, held before the H-2A workers who come up from Mexico for the season head home, so the people who picked the fruit are there for the first glass.

Classes  ·  Front Line Mondays

The Guest in Front of You

A live online staff class for anyone in a guest-facing hospitality role

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 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 runs live on Zoom with practice in small breakout groups, and nobody needs to prepare anything. An owner or manager can send one person or the whole team.

Around the World  ·  For Hoteliers

The Strand Keeps Its Name

A hotel group from Bangkok takes over Yangon’s oldest grand hotel and promises to leave most of it alone

The Strand Hotel opened on the Yangon riverfront in 1901 and soon passed to the Sarkies brothers, the same family of hoteliers behind Raffles in Singapore and the Eastern & Oriental in Penang. It is three storeys of Victorian architecture and polished Burmese teak on Strand Road, a few minutes’ walk from Sule Pagoda, and the hotel’s own history counts Noël Coward, Rudyard Kipling, and Orson Welles among the guests who have taken a drink in its bar. In 2019 it became the first hotel in Myanmar to receive a blue plaque from the Yangon Heritage Trust.

This month it reopened under new management as The Strand Hotel Yangon, part of Thailand’s Dusit Collection, and the most interesting thing about the handover is how little the new operator says it will change. Dusit’s vice president of operations and development told TravelMole that the hotel keeps its name and that the plan is to preserve its identity. The Strand High Tea and Sarkies Bar carry on as they were, along with the 24-hour butler service that comes with every suite, which Dusit says no other hotel in Yangon offers.

Most hotels that change hands go the other way, with a new name over the door and a lobby that could be in any city. Dusit is betting that the Strand guests have read about for a century is the one they want to find when they walk in off Strand Road.

The Numbers

$60

Median tasting room purchase at wineries in the Eastern United States, against $90 for all wineries surveyed, from Farm Credit East’s wine industry outlook published November 3. The same report found the median Eastern winery adds only 5% of its visitors to its mailing list, against 20% overall, so most guests leave without the winery knowing how to reach them again.

75%

Share of hotel guests who said they would rather deal with a person, face to face, when they need help during a stay, in Hospitality Technology’s 2026 Guest Engagement Study, published November 6. In the same study, 29% said delivery robots make the stay worse.

2.5%

Decline in wine and spirits revenue at bars and restaurants over the 12 months through September, against a 5.6% drop at retail stores, according to SipSource, the data arm of the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America. Both channels are down, and the bar and the dining room are holding up better than the shelf.

Worth Reading

Sonoma State Students Find a Gap in How Wineries Manage the Customer Experience

Wine Industry Advisor, November 4

Wine business students and their professor, Angelo Camillo, visited seven wineries in Napa, Sonoma, and Carneros and came back with a proposal: run the whole guest relationship the way a hotel company does, from the first Instagram post to the last club shipment, with one owner. Camillo says the industry built some of the best guest experiences anywhere but rarely manages the tasting room, the club, and shipping as one system. The case for a daily pre-shift briefing is in there too.

Marvin R. Shanken, Visionary Publisher Who Transformed Wine, Dies at 83

Wine Spectator, October 29

The longtime editor and publisher of Wine Spectator died October 29. Among much else, he created the magazine’s Grand Award in 1981 to point readers toward restaurants with exceptional wine lists, which did a great deal to make the wine list something a restaurant could be proud of.

How Longevity Has Moved From the Spa Into the Suite

Elite Traveler, November 8

The luxury minibar is on a health kick, with the little bottles of spirits making room for electrolyte drinks, supplements, and sleep aids, and some hotels now bring recovery gear straight into the suite. For a hotel bar or a tasting room, it’s the same question this week’s Insights asks: what does the place have for the guest who isn’t drinking, and does anyone on staff have a story to go with it?

Meet the Winemakers  ·  For the Host

Tom Croghan, The Vineyards at Dodon. Photo courtesy of Tom Croghan.

“Regina, the vines are telling me to pick.”

Tom Croghan, The Vineyards at Dodon

Asked what a newcomer to wine already knows that a winemaker can build on, Tom Croghan said they know the difference between a fresh local tomato and one grown to survive a truck. Start there, he said, and the difference between a farmed wine and a commodity one makes sense to anyone. Croghan is a physician who spent most of his career in health policy, and at seventy-two he came out of retirement this year to bring in the harvest at Dodon, his wife’s family farm near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, after an April frost took seventy percent of the fruit. His interview includes the Sunday in 2024 when he told his general manager the vines were telling him to pick, and the rain from a nor’easter started an hour after the last grapes came in.

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