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hey say if you want to gain empathy with someone, you need to walk in their shoes. This allows you to understand the way they see the world and what matters most to them.
Well, that’s what Lisa and I did two weeks ago. We teamed up with two other couples and went Wine Tasting in Paso Robles for 4 days and it was fantastic! (yet another boring business trip LOL)
Many of you know that Paso Robles is one of my favorite spots to source grapes from. But I am always up there in the middle of the night, stuck in the center of a dark vineyard and I never get the chance to see the Consumer side of the industry.
And we really wanted to see what you guys see in a tasting room and to get some downtime.
So the 6 of us rented an Airbnb house (3 Kings) that was just within walking distance to downtown. The house was a good size with 3 king bedrooms, clean and had a hot tub. The coolest part was that there was a deer trail next to the house. The deer would visit us every morning and dusk and stand 20 feet away munching grass.
Over the four days, we visited 18 wineries, which was quite a bit, but we took it for the team. We went to small wineries, big wineries, fancy wineries, and humble wineries. We had attentive stewards and non-attentive stewards. We had knowledgeable educators and some that were fairly clueless. Some were warm and welcoming, some were brisk and some were into themselves.
We wrote a whole list of our likes and our dislikes. The great news is that we will be stepping up the Koi Zen Cellars experience over the next few months based upon our take away notes. This includes taking another “business trip” to Paso with Jon and Cat so that they can experience what we experienced. (It’s tough but someone has to do it)
In the end, we came home with about 30 bottles of wine to stock our home selection and to be used in our “Wine Off” winery events which you will hear about shortly. The other thing that we noticed was that Paso wines were typically in the $40-$45 range which is considerably higher than our price for the same fruit, so stop on by Koi Zen and grab some bottles, save money and save gas all at the same time.
Cheers