Sonoma
Free Wheeling Tours
The other day I was booked for a bus tour through my friends
at Beau Tours. When they sent me the run sheet I was surprised by the brevity of
the comments. That’s where the itinerary is described. When you are taking a
thirty passenger bus into wine country filled with a group of thirsty people you
want to have an idea of where you’re going.
But then I saw the note: Sonoma Tour, Clients have their own
itinerary! How cool and how Sonoma. This would so not work in Napa just over
the mountains. I remember a tour there in a stretch hummer with a dozen young folks
from American Canyon. They had all been to wine country many times and so they
thought they could free wheel their way around the valley en masse. “Not So
Fast!” Napa says. Half the places we went to gave me a hard time, and one
turned the clients away in the parking lot.
At the beginning of the run I had explained to the clients
that very few wineries would allow a large group on a Saturday in the high
season without warning but they had pooh poohed my concerns. Experience
matters!
In Sonoma wineries are more open to groups arriving on the
fly. They’re happy for the business. They’re happy that the customers came to
Sonoma instead of going to Napa. Yeah, they may get slammed for a little while
trying to find enough clean glasses, but they know that the numbers that come
through their tasting room doors equal future sales through store shelves and restaurant
wine lists. When you look at the most best selling restaurant wines in America Sonoma runs neck and neck with
Napa.
That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to talk with the client
in advance, and then call my friends at the wineries to arrange a more pleasant
reception for our group. What’s the sense of having friends if you never call
them? The point of all this is about attitudes. Napa is very aware of their
international reputation as the top wine destination in the world. I read an
article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a popular Napa winery that gets
400,000 visitors yearly. The whole province of Bordeaux only gets 700,000 wine
visitors. In Napa this is one winery! Admittedly it has deli, but still…
Standing at that international pinnacle may make Napa
nervous, I think that Sonoma doesn’t take itself quite so seriously. They could
if they wanted to; Sonoma is probably the second biggest wine destination in
the world, more historically significant than Napa, more convenient to the city
via the Golden Gate. But for some reason, they’re just a bit more relaxed, a
little more casual, and they don’t get so crazy when you bring them a whole
bunch of paying customers, at once.
Note: Whenever you visit wine country with a group it is
always a great idea to make arrangements with the wineries in advance. This
allows them to allocate staff and find enough clean glasses. Your transportation
company is happy to do that and will have great ideas about how to put the
wineries in a sequence that works best for the guests.
Ralph & Lahni de Amicis are authors of the Amicis Winery
Guide Books and iPhone Apps, and owners of Amicis Tours and Cuore Libre
Publishing. They are authors of over twenty books on health, design and travel.
Their products can be found on the sites http://www.amicistours.com
and http://www.spaceandtime.com
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