Sure, people have the right to express their frustrations, reasonable or unreasonable. But I am really surprised to read a bunch of complaints about shipping directed at Rhys as though there were some habitual issue there, as that does not square with my experience. I’ve been ordering from them for a decade, and they’ve always seemed to me to be on the plus side both in terms of delivering when promised and communication. I went back and looked last night, and there have been exactly four times over the decade that their wines did not ship in the season when I expected them to. Three of those were futures orders, one of which shipped a season earlier than expected and the other two shipped a season later. That kind of variation over a decade of ordering is just noise to me, but I guess could be annoying to others.
The fourth instance was the 2015 Aeris Etna Bianco, which for some reason I had down as shipping in the Spring of 2019, even though the offer only went out that May. It may be that I wrote down the wrong expected ship date, since it seems unlikely they promised to ship before summer for orders placed in mid-May. But also, this is the wine that they ultimately replaced with the 2016 because they decided on their own that the 2015 was not up to snuff. I got a proactive email from Rhys about this in October, 2019 (under 5 months from the order date), and the wine was in my hands in November. So again, no complaint from me here; in fact, this is one that feels like strong customer service, not like a problem, since they identified an issue with the product ordered, corrected it on their own, communicated clearly, and had the replacement wine on my doorstep about as soon as the original could have been expected at the time of my order.
I wonder whether the people complaining about communication have reached out to Rhys and had trouble getting a response, or whether you are expecting that they would reach out to you every time they move shipping dates, either within a season or across seasons. While I appreciate proactive communication, I am not used to seeing it on a regular basis from any of the retailers or wineries from which I purchase. Maybe some of you buy a lot more wine than I do and receive different treatment. For me, if I have a question, I usually have to ask (and I do).
When I have reached out to Rhys, I have always had a reply within a couple of days at the latest, with one exception, which was this past fall. Notwithstanding the snotty comment from Rajesh suggesting that everyone should have been totally acclimated to COVID by this past November/December (when California was getting absolutely creamed), I assume that the pandemic affects staffing, work processes, supplies, records access, vendor interaction, and probably many things I have not thought of that go into the shipping equation. So I am not surprised that both communication and shipping would take longer than usual. When I wrote to ask about shipping right at the beginning of December, I did not receive an email reply for two weeks. But in the interim I had received 9 shipping notices (between Rhys and the shipper) and all of my wines. So, I get that you might get testy if it looked like the winery was ignoring your email, but you could in that case just pick up the phone. I certainly would have done so if I had been worried, but again, based on past history and what was going on in the world at the time, I simply assumed that Rhys was hard at work trying to get thousands of customers’ wine shipped in the middle of a pandemic. And, voila, it turns out I was right. (Though it also seems that not everyone’s orders made it out despite their best efforts.)
Even as someone who generally has pretty high expectations of vendors, I am with Robert in feeling that the communication and customer service I’ve received from Rhys has been right near the top of what I see in this industry.
– Matt
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}