Matthew Gudenius

Review of Girard Winery

1) The wines are hit or miss, but generally too ex...

1) The wines are hit or miss, but generally too expensive.

2) Tasting room is busy (packed) on weekends (which is the only time we can really go, despite being locals), often without even being able to even park in the parking lot.

3) Their club membership benefits are getting worse, worse, worse, to the point where it would not even be worth joining now:

(a) Not as many people allowed to do a free tasting. In the past, we have been able to do one for ourselves plus 2 guests, so it was a nice place to bring out of town visitors. Not anymore! Now it is limited to 2 people total.. so if you have a significant other with you, forget about bringing any other friends or family!

(b) They now LIMIT the number of free tastings you can get, to only 4 VISITS PER YEAR. This means that, if you want to pick up your wines,(for example, if you visit from the Bay Area), you can LITERALLY only taste at the times you pick up the 4 wine shipments per year -- can't do any additional visits!

To be honest, even though we are locals we only went 3-4 times over the course of a year... BUT it was nice to know that we COULD go if we wanted to, like if we had out of town guests. Now we can neither go whenever we want nor bring any guests with us...

(c) They told us we could taste for free at the other Vintage Wine Estates wineries, but when we attempted to do this (at Sonoma Coast Vineyards), they gave us a bunch of attitude and acted like that program was not valid, and kept saying there were "glitches in the computer system" and that that perk was "going to go away soon."

The main reason we became club members again was so that we could also try out some of the local wineries. After we got this sort of attitude from Sonoma Coast and Clos Pegase, we just stopped trying to taste at any other ones.

4) They have botched so many things with basic customer service and logistics it is unbelievable:

(a) they didn't update our address and phone number, and even after telling them both over email and in person at the tasting room, they continued to have our old contact information on file.

(b) They shipped one of our boxes/selections to us -- even though we elected "local pickup" because we live 13 minutes away, right here in Napa Valley. Their emails about the pickup deadline (which did not exist in the past) went straight to Spam folder, and they did not bother to even try to contact us over phone when we were never responding to pick up the shipment... they just charged us additional fee to ship it about 10 miles to our house. When I wrote to complain about this, they did nothing... no apology, no offer to waive the shipping fee or credit it for our next shipment.

5) Oh, and did I mention the tasting fee has gone up about 100% in the past few years?? (Yes, it used to be $15 for regular and $25 for limited flight... now it is $30 and $50! Doesn't get waived unless you spend something like $150 on wine...) So, now that we just canceled our club membership due to the numerous problems outline above... there's zero reason for us ever to return again!