In my travels to various wineries in Ontario, I started to notice that when I left some tasting rooms, I left with an uneasy feeling. I couldn’t pin it down.
Then after one especially bad encounter at a winery, I asked my wife if she had noticed anything weird about the experience. We discussed several factors but there was only one that we thought might have been the source: the height of the tasting room counter. It had made us feel like we were at the front desk of the local precinct, with the “desk officer” 2-3 feet taller than ourselves. And the people on the other side of the counter had a parochial attitude that was reminiscent of visiting the principal’s office (not that I ever spent any time there :-)).
I started to pay attention to my winery experiences and I noticed that ones with low tasting counters or wooden tables resulted in an overall “warmer” and more welcoming experience for me, and those with the very high tasting counters left me feeling less engaged.
Is your tasting counter saying more than you think?
