Wine estates

A wine estate’s treatment is a tasting. It is a service like any other, and it is almost never run like one: a visitor arrives at a gate, finds their own way to a building, stands at a counter and waits to be noticed by somebody who is already pouring for four other people.

Everything about the visit is decided in that first minute of being noticed or not. Who is behind the counter, whether they ask anything at all about the visitor before they begin, whether this person is read as a buyer or as an interruption. The wine is the one part of the estate that is reliably excellent. The visit around it is the part that decides whether a case is bought, and whether a case is shipped.

And most estates now sell a great deal more than wine — lunch, a cellar tour, a garden, a wedding enquiry taken by the same person pouring the Chenin. A visitor experiences all of it as one place. The estate very often runs it as three businesses sharing a car park.

• Estates whose wine wins awards and whose tasting room is staffed by whoever happens to be available.
• Owners and winemakers who are recognised at their own counter and can never be a visitor at it.
• Anyone whose restaurant, tastings and events are run separately and read to a visitor as one property.

• What arriving unannounced was like, from the gate to the first word spoken to anybody.
• How the tasting was conducted for somebody nobody knew — and what was assumed about them.
• How the parts of the estate handed a visitor between one another, or failed to.
• What a visitor bought, what they had meant to buy, and what they still recalled three days later.