Start with Setting the Standard
Building a winery team around the whole guest relationship
Ask your tasting room team what a successful guest experience looks like. Then ask your manager. Then ask the owner. How closely do those answers align?
“Make people feel welcome.” “Sell wine.” “Build relationships.” “Grow the club.” All reasonable answers. Each leaves considerable room for interpretation.
One employee believes mentioning the wine club fulfills the expectation. Another makes a thoughtful invitation based on what the guest has shared. Both may believe they have done exactly what was asked.
That gap between intention and interpretation is where setting the standards begins, and the first opportunity comes before an employee ever serves a guest.
It continues with the job description
Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table offers a useful foundation for thinking about who we hire. His “51 percenters” approach gives slightly greater weight to the emotional skills of hospitality than to technical proficiency: 51% to how someone relates to and cares for others, and 49% to technical skills. Both matter. The emphasis recognizes how much the person delivering the experience contributes to its success. [1]
For wineries, that raises an important question: What kind of person is our job description attracting?
A posting centered on a love of wine, sharing stories, and welcoming guests communicates one version of the role. A posting that also describes discovering guest preferences, making purchase recommendations, and contributing to sales and membership goals communicates a fuller picture.
An applicant who enjoys helping people find wines they love, and feels motivated when those conversations lead to purchases, has a clearer understanding of the opportunity.
That clarity carries into the interview. A candidate’s curiosity about people, response to feedback, and comfort making a recommendation can tell us as much about their fit as their ability to describe Cabernet Sauvignon. Hiring establishes the first agreement about what success looks like. Training builds on it.
Hiring for the whole relationship
What got us to this dance may not keep us here. As the ways consumers interact with wineries evolve, the roles we hire for need room to evolve with them.
Consider the title “wine educator.” Paired with a job description focused on pouring wine and presenting vineyard stories, it can create a specific understanding of the work: my place is behind the tasting bar, and my responsibility is to educate guests and it ends when the guest leaves.
Yet the winery business is based on building relationships with our customers. The person who helped a guest discover a favorite wine may be exceptionally well positioned to continue that relationship. A thoughtful follow-up phone call can build on the conversation they already started. At an on-the-road member event, a familiar tasting room face can make the experience more personal and give the employee a deeper understanding of the members they serve. It goes beyond that one, initial interaction.
That is the opportunity in hiring and developing utility players: people who see several ways to contribute to, grow the the guest relationship, and feel comfortable learning how to work across them.
A host might divide time between tasting room appointments, outbound calls, and occasional member events. The mix depends on the business, the season, and the employee’s strengths. The shared expectation is that we meet guests and members wherever they choose to interact with us.
That expectation belongs in the job description and the interview conversation. It also belongs in training. Being excellent in person provides a foundation for a phone conversation; employees still need practice with that channel, access to customer history, and clarity about how to record the next step. Managers allocate time for the work and explain how it contributes to the employee’s goals.
How we do business here
Meyer opened Union Square Cafe in 1985. The hospitality principles he developed became the foundation for a much broader business, including the founding of Shake Shack. Those principles are identified in Shake Shack’s own filings as fundamental to its operations. The standards had roots in a single restaurant before they supported a business operating at scale. [2, 3]
One of Meyer’s enduring ideas is “Center the Salt Shaker,” which Union Square Hospitality Group describes as maintaining a commitment to excellence and the values that matter most. It gives the team a shared reference point for how the business operates. [4]
What is that reference point at your winery?
Some elements of an experience naturally vary. A first-time visitor may appreciate an introduction to the region. A longtime member may want to hear about a new vineyard block. Employees bring different personalities and ways of connecting.
Alongside that flexibility are the non-negotiables: the things every guest can count on. Perhaps every arriving guest is acknowledged, even when the team is occupied. Every host learns something about the guest’s preferences before making recommendations. Every guest receives a clear opportunity to purchase, with their response respected.
The particulars belong to the business. Their value comes from a shared understanding of what they look like in practice. A standard becomes easier to deliver when an employee has seen it demonstrated, practiced it, and received useful feedback. “Make a personal connection” takes on meaning when a manager can explain how something the guest shared shaped the rest of the experience.
Clear roles and accountability
Brené Brown’s work brings another essential piece to this conversation: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” In Dare to Lead, she connects clarity with honest conversations about expectations and performance. Holding someone accountable for an expectation that was never clearly communicated creates an unfair starting point. [5]
In a tasting room, clarity also means knowing who is responsible when the day gets complicated. A reservation runs late. A guest is unhappy. An employee needs approval to resolve a problem, and the manager is in a meeting. Who is in charge? What can the employee decide independently? Where does the issue go next?
When those answers are understood, employees can act with confidence. The guest receives a more coordinated response, and the manager has a clearer view of where support is needed.
The same applies to accountability. Someone owns the goal, someone tracks progress, and everyone understands their contribution. Managers have a defined responsibility to observe, provide feedback, and follow through. Employees know when they will discuss results and how they can ask for help. That structure makes accountability part of the working relationship.
Give club growth a destination
“Grow the wine club” leaves a great deal unanswered. By how much? By when? What counts as growth?
SMART goals, meaning specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, give that ambition a useful shape. For a hypothetical winery, a goal might read: Increase active purchasing club membership from 1,000 to 1,100 by December 31, with progress reviewed monthly.
The winery first defines “active purchasing,” then tests whether the target is achievable given visitation, conversion, attrition, and available resources. Everyone uses the same definition and reporting method.
Now the conversation can extend beyond the number of signups. If the winery starts with 1,000 members, adds 200, and loses 150, it finishes with 1,050. The tasting room may have met its acquisition target while the business falls short of its membership goal.
That makes attrition relevant to the person inviting guests to join. Are new members leaving because the commitment differed from what they understood? Are longtime members struggling with shipment frequency? What is the club team hearing that could help the tasting room describe membership more accurately?
Sharing that information gives both teams something useful to act on. The tasting room can refine how it presents the club. The club team can identify opportunities to improve the member experience. Leadership can see whether acquisition and retention plans support the same destination.
“One team, one dream” gains meaning when the tasting room knows what is happening with retention, the club team understands what new members were promised, and outbound conversations build on both. Shared records and clear handoffs help those insights travel with the customer relationship. Departments still need people who own the details, with a name and a date attached to each follow-up.
Paying for the relationship
Hiring people who enjoy building relationships, then giving them opportunities to work across channels, brings us to another question: Does our incentive compensation support that expectation?
Tips can make tasting room positions financially attractive and help wineries compete for strong candidates. They also mean guests contribute directly to employees’ earnings. When someone moves from a tipped tasting room shift to outbound calls or a member event, the earning opportunity changes. A utility-player role becomes more compelling when compensation reflects the value of that work across assignments.
The same consideration applies to where a sale happens. Imagine a host establishes a relationship during a visit, learns what the guest enjoys, and receives permission to stay connected. Over the following weeks, that employee follows up with a relevant wine recommendation. The guest eventually purchases online.
The relationship worked. Did the incentive program recognize it?
If compensation rewards only transactions completed directly with the employee, we create a reason for that person to steer the guest back to their own register, phone line, or order form. A guest ready to purchase online may hear, “Call me and I’ll place that order for you.” We have added a step to the customer’s experience because of how we pay our team.
A channel-agnostic incentive program gives the employee confidence to say, “Absolutely, order whichever way is most convenient for you.” The winery’s value proposition carries through, and the employee’s contribution remains visible even when the transaction happens elsewhere.
There are several ways to approach that recognition. Customer tags or assigned relationship owners can help connect purchases to the employee doing the follow-up. A campaign might include a defined attribution window, perhaps two weeks or 30 days, during which qualifying purchases count toward an incentive regardless of channel.
Those are design choices to test and refine. The right window depends on the offer, buying cycle, and brand. Clear rules address overlapping outreach, existing customer relationships, returns, and how credit is shared when several people contribute. Documented activity provides context; purchases following outreach alone do not prove that the outreach caused them.
A thoughtful program can combine individual recognition with a shared reward tied to a broader business goal, such as growth in active purchasing members. That gives employees a reason to develop their own relationships while supporting the team’s success.
The program also needs to be understandable. Employees can see which activities qualify, how results are measured, and when compensation is earned. Managers can explain the calculation and resolve questions consistently.
This takes deliberate design, followed by testing against business results and employee behavior. Are guests finding it easier to purchase? Are employees following through? Is the program producing profitable growth? Are handoffs improving?
We are asking employees to build relationships wherever the consumer chooses to engage. A well-engineered incentive program makes that expectation financially credible.
A standard people can work toward
There is a meaningful connection between the words in a job posting and the membership number on a year-end report. The job posting begins the agreement. Daily standards explain how the business delivers its promise. Clear responsibilities help people navigate decisions, while training gives them opportunities to develop. Shared goals show how their work contributes, and compensation reinforces the behaviors we value.
A useful starting point is to ask a few people to describe the same expectation. Their answers may reveal a strong shared understanding. They may also reveal a gap that has been mistaken for a performance problem.
Making that expectation clear gives everyone a fairer, more productive place to begin. The guest experiences one winery. Our standards can make that continuity part of how we work.
References.
Danny Meyer, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business (HarperCollins, 2006). See also Union Square Hospitality Group, Careers: https://www.ushg.org/careers/
Union Square Hospitality Group, About: https://www.ushg.com/about
Shake Shack, 2015 prospectus, hospitality principles: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1620533/000162053315000038/shak-20150813_424b4.htm
Union Square Hospitality Group, Careers, “Center the Salt Shaker”: https://www.ushg.com/careers
Brené Brown, “Clear Is Kind. Unclear Is Unkind.” Adapted from Dare to Lead, October 15, 2018: https://brenebrown.com/articles/2018/10/15/clear-is-kind-unclear-is-unkind/