Tasting Room Fees

[Thomas]

I'll stick to my guns on this one. The next time a new restaurant opens for business nearby, go there on the first night and see if the proprietor is handing out free tastes of the menu before you sit down to dinner. That likely would constitute the kind of promotion you are expecting from a new winery, but it also likely won't happen.

Fact is, and I know this from personal experience with my own winery, more tourists visit wine tasting rooms than wine consumers; a line has to be drawn to contain costs, and that line could begin with a policy to put the tasting fee back into the purchase price of wines actually bought by the taster.

I am a major wine consumer, but I don't get upset if asked to pay for a tasting. If I think the wines are too expensive for what they offer, I move on and the winery can keep the buck or two. I have hated a lot more movies than wines, and I have never gotten my money back from the theater owners who foisted the movies on me--never asked for it either.