The Number Nobody Prints

By Patrick R. Dunn

The tasting room at Casque Wines sits on a flower farm outside Loomis, a few minutes off the interstate that climbs from Sacramento up over the pass into Reno. It has been there since 2013. The seating is all outdoors on gravel, under oaks old enough to throw shade over most of the tables by early afternoon, with string lights run between the trees and the pergola. A cafe sits a short walk across the property. The whole arrangement suggests a place people stop at rather than plan around, which is exactly what I was doing.

The pours were small. Enough to cover the bottom of the bowl and no more, in a glass etched with the helmet the winery takes its name from, which left the wine sitting low and lit from behind by whatever came through the leaves. I worked through the list, formed an opinion about every wine on it, and walked back to the car with nothing sitting heavy. When I wanted a second look at one of them, a second look came. No spit bucket sat in front of me and I never once reached for where it should have been. I have been in a lot of tasting rooms this year and that sentence applies to almost none of them.

Wine regions publish an enormous amount of advice about how to spend a day and almost none about how many rooms belong in one. The trail maps carry a dozen properties. The passports have stamps to collect. The visitor guides lay out itineraries of four and five stops with the drive times calculated between them, as though the road were the only variable in the equation. Somewhere near the bottom of the page there is a line about drinking responsibly, and that line is carrying more weight than any one sentence can hold.

The honest number is three.

Before anything else about that number, one thing I will not soften. I do not drive impaired and I do not make allowances for anyone who does. The wine business tends to treat this as a private calculation a guest runs on the walk back to the car, and that framing is how a good afternoon ends up in a police report. The consequence is never private. It arrives at somebody else's intersection.

That is the floor. The number I am after sits well above it and would hold even if every guest in every wine region showed up with a driver. Hiring one does not move it, which is the part that surprises people. A car and a driver solve the legal question and leave the palate precisely where it was. Six rooms with a driver is still six rooms, and the last two are still spent on somebody who cannot taste them. The only thing that genuinely changes the arithmetic is spitting, and even that buys one more stop. Four, for a guest who is disciplined about it and eats something along the way.

Three is where the palate is still working. By the fourth room the mouth has been coated and stripped and coated again, and the tannin from the last stop is still sitting on the teeth. A Cabernet at four in the afternoon tastes like the third Cabernet of the day. Whatever the winemaker spent two years getting into that wine, the guest can no longer find it.

Three is where the attention holds, which matters more. I teach storytelling to tasting room teams, and this is the hardest truth to deliver: the history, the terroir, and the winemaker's vision all bounce right off a guest at stop number four. The first room gets a person's full curiosity. The second gets most of it. The third gets enough to work with. The fourth gets somebody warm and agreeable who is already sorting through the afternoon instead of taking in a new one, and by the fifth the day has flattened into a single impression of hillsides and stemware. Ask that guest a week later which wine came from where.

I have done this to myself at scale. At passport weekends and open-house events I have walked out with two and three cases, and by the time those bottles came up in the rotation at home I could not reconstruct what had attracted me to any of them. They turned into the wine I opened when a crowd came over, or they went into lots for charity auctions. Every one of those bottles counted as a sale on somebody's books, and every one of those wineries heard from me exactly once.

Holding at three has not reduced what I spend. I buy roughly the same amount of wine from fewer places, and I know what I bought and why. The difference shows up afterward, in the reorders, and in the memberships I keep because a bottle was still good in my own kitchen in November. A winery that sold me six bottles on a day I could taste has a better year than one that sold me twelve on a day I could not.

I know how my own habits changed because I remember arguing against them. Studying for the WSET certification taught me to spit, which I had never done as a matter of course, and the logic becomes obvious inside a week. Nobody assesses eight wines seriously while swallowing eight wines. Age finished the job. I take samples now. I spit, or I take a small amount and leave the rest, and I no longer treat a pour as a portion to be finished. Twenty years ago I would have called that a waste of good wine and meant it.

Almost nothing about the way a tasting room is built accommodates any of that.

The pour is where it starts, and it is not a regional habit. I have sat in tasting rooms across the United States and in wine regions abroad, and the overpour turns up in all of them, most consistently at home. A flight arrives as a series of glasses of wine with a smaller number printed in front of the ounces, each one at something close to half a glass. Run that across five or six wines and the flight is most of a bottle. The decision behind it was generosity, and generosity is what causes the trouble, because the guest reads a full pour as a gift and finishes it. Leaving wine in the glass in front of the person who poured it feels rude, and nobody has ever told the guest otherwise.

Friends of mine have a running joke about where a person got overserved that day. It lands every time and it is not funny. It describes a Saturday of driving between properties that each handed over more wine than anyone asked for, and it only ever gets said once everybody is home.

The spit bucket tells the same story from the other direction. I have sat on patios where there was nothing to spit into anywhere in sight, not on the table, not on the counter, which settles the question of what is expected without anyone having to say it. A guest who wants to spit and has nowhere to do it stops wanting to. Rooms that put a bucket on every table without comment have solved a problem their neighbors have not noticed they have.

Then there is the tasting fee waived with a purchase, which is the most expensive courtesy in the business. Buy a bottle or two and the fee comes off. It works in the moment and the register agrees. What it actually does is convert a large pour into a purchase made by somebody whose palate went flat two stops ago, and that purchase has a second act. The bottle gets opened at home three weeks later by a person with a clear mouth, and it does not taste like whatever it seemed to taste like on the patio. The winery counted the sale on Saturday and never learned about the customer it did not get.

The opposite extreme does just as much damage. In regions like Napa, where fees routinely clear a hundred dollars, the guest's relationship to the pour changes. At twenty dollars, a guest might take a sip and leave the rest. At a hundred and twenty, they feel financially obligated to swallow every drop just to claw back some value. Waiving that fee usually requires buying three or four premium bottles. By stop three, the guest is carrying palate fatigue and buyer's remorse at the same time. They are buying wine to solve the math problem the tasting room handed them.

None of this is anybody's fault in particular. Nobody at any single winery decided that a guest should arrive at the fourth room of the day unable to taste anything, and every one of them contributed a share of it.

Which is why the fourth room loses the sale it believes it is chasing. A guest at stop four has stopped comparing wineries and started negotiating with fatigue. The host tells the story, often the best story of the day, and it lands on someone with no room left to hold it. Club conversion is a decision made by a person who is still curious, and curiosity runs out well before the wine does. The room down the road was never the competition. The two rooms earlier that afternoon were.

A winery can act on this without lecturing anybody or hanging a sign about moderation. Keep the tasting fee low enough that it does not have to be bought off with bottles. Pour less and offer more, which gives the guest a better tasting and costs the winery less wine. Put the bucket out, put water on every table before anyone asks, and say early and plainly that a guest is welcome to take a sample instead of a glass. A great many people have never been told that spitting is permitted, let alone expected, and none of them want to be the first at the table to try it. And when someone mentions on the way in that this is their second stop, that is useful information rather than a disappointment. It tells the host how much room is left and how to spend it.

Then drop the printed tasting notes and spend actual time with the person on the other side of the counter. Storytelling paces the experience. A real conversation slows the pour rate down and buys the host enough time to notice that a guest has already been overserved somewhere else. It also brings the guest back into the room. Reciting technical specifications isolates people. A story ties the wine to memory and sense and gives the guest a reason to take part in it.

There is a version of the weekend that pays better for everyone counting receipts at the end of it. Three rooms on Saturday and three on Sunday is still six wineries. The difference is that the guest tasted all six. The trip stretches across two nights instead of one long afternoon, which means a hotel gets the room and a restaurant gets dinner and probably lunch as well. Lodging and independent restaurants have had a hard run in most of these regions, and the trail maps treat them as the thing a visitor does between wineries. Most wine regions have more good places to eat and sleep at ordinary prices than a single afternoon gives anyone time to find. The itinerary that stacks five tasting rooms into one day is quietly steering money away from half the businesses in any wine region.

Casque has most of this arranged without making a production of it. The list runs five to seven wines. Walk-ins are welcome during regular hours, groups are kept under eight, the cafe is a short walk across the property, and last call is at four thirty, which is a decision about how the day ends rather than a thing left to chance.

I got back on the interstate and drove east into the foothills. The last wine was still there, and I could have told anyone who asked what it was.

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Sources and notes. Details on Casque Wines come from the winery's published visitor information and from my own visit. I was not driving that day.