Have you been here before?

The tasting room sat at the end of a gravel drive in Dry Creek Valley outside Healdsburg, an old barn with the big doors rolled open and a dog asleep on the concrete in the only patch of shade. On a Saturday in late summer two longtime customers stood at the counter about four feet apart, and I was at the far end with a flight I had paid for, close enough to hear both conversations and far enough away that nobody minded.

The man on the left was greeted by his first name before he had set his keys down. The tasting room host asked about his daughter’s wedding in Petaluma and whether the Zinfandel they had poured at the reception held up in the heat, and then she reached under the counter for a bottle that wasn’t on the menu, an unlabeled 2016 old-vine Zinfandel from the library with the vintage written on the capsule in silver marker, and poured him a taste without being asked. Over the next twenty minutes I picked up that he has been in the club for a decade, takes three cases a year, and hosts a dinner for the winemaker every spring.

The woman on the right had driven over from Sacramento that morning. The host smiled, handed her the tasting menu, and asked, “Have you been here before?” The woman said she had, once or twice a year since 2020, the first time with a friend for her fiftieth birthday, and that she usually went home with a few bottles of the Zinfandel. “Oh, welcome back,” the host said, and she meant it, and then she poured the standard flight off the printed card. Nothing about it was rude, and every word the host said was correct. The woman paid for the flight the way she always does and didn’t seem to mind. She has been asked to join the club more than once and has always said no, because she doesn’t want four shipments a year arriving on someone else’s schedule and would rather pick her own bottles while she’s standing in the room.

She watched the library pour go into the man’s glass two spots down. She didn’t say anything about it, and the host, who had already turned back toward the man and the wedding story, never saw her watching. She bought two bottles, fewer than usual, and was back in her car before he had gotten to the part about the toasts.

After she left I stayed with my flight and watched the host work the room for another half hour. A couple in matching fleece jackets came in, and she asked them the same question she had asked the woman from Sacramento. The man said no, first time, but he was a server at a restaurant up in Healdsburg. She brightened right away, waived their tasting fee, and took fifteen percent off the two bottles they bought, because the industry discount was a button on her screen. There was no button for a woman who had been driving over from Sacramento once or twice a year since 2020.

The host was maybe twenty-four, quick on the tablet, and she knew the release notes better than I did. Between guests she checked her phone, the way most of us do when a room goes quiet, and she tended to look up when someone reached the counter rather than when they came through the door. When a guest said something that wasn’t on the sheet, a story about a wedding or a question about the old barn out back, she smiled and went back to the flight. I meet plenty of hosts her age who are easier with a screen than with a stranger.

Near the end of my flight the owner came through from the back with a printout in his hand. He leaned over the counter, asked the host how many club sign-ups she had so far, and tapped the tablet to check the day’s average order. He said hello to the man with the wedding story by name and shook his hand. He walked right past the spot where the woman from Sacramento had stood twenty minutes earlier, and nothing on his printout would have told him she had bought fewer bottles than usual and driven home.

On the way out along West Dry Creek Road I thought about Smith Story Wine Cellars in Healdsburg. We were members there for a while and then stopped, the way people do, and in the years after we kept pulling in whenever we came through Healdsburg and leaving with a few bottles. Every time, we were greeted like old friends. It never seemed to matter that the shipments had stopped, and nobody treated us like a lapsed account. We rejoined this year, and the way we were treated during the years we weren’t members is most of the reason.

She’ll probably be back sometime next year, and there’s a fair chance someone will ask her again whether she has been here before. If she stops coming one day, there won’t be a cancellation email, because she never joined anything she could cancel. Her purchases will just stop showing up in the system, and nobody in the office runs a report that would show a regular who quietly found another winery down the road.

The Dry Creek Valley tasting room is a composite of two winery visits I made this summer, and the guests are drawn from both. Neither winery is identified. Smith Story Wine Cellars is real, and the account of it is my own.

Another story about reading the guest in front of the host: The owner was at the bar. The how-to that goes with this story: Recognize the Regulars Outside the Club.