I have been reviewing wine tasting rooms on Yelp since 2008, when my wife and I visited Paso Robles and discovered customer friendly places like Tablas Creek and Justin for the first time. Since then, I have visited additional tasting rooms in California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Colorado, and Idaho, including quite a few in Napa, Sonoma, Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Joaquin, Calaveras, Tehama, Nevada, Yuba, Solano, Alameda, Contra Costa, Madera, Yolo, Lake, Amador, El Dorado, Placer, Mendocino, and San Diego Counties.
My experience at Gamling & McDuck is the second worst wine tasting room related event* I have encountered in those eleven plus years of being an active Yelp reviewer at the Elite level. It is my sad duty to have to recount my experience so that you and your wine tasting friends might not have to face a similar fate in the future.
My wife and I recently completed a three day visit to Napa Valley. We used Tock to reserve tastings at Hess Collection and at Gamling & McDuck. Our first planned visit was a 10am tasting here on January 2, 2020. We made both appointments online before the New Year and received confirmation emails in both cases. While the Hess Collection visit on Day 2 went fine, despite arriving earlier in the day than our official reservation time slot, when we arrived at the Gamling & McDuck tasting room in downtown Napa on Day 1, the front door was locked, and no one arrived to greet us, despite waiting for more than a quarter of an hour in the cold.
After three emails and two phone calls, Adam M., the owner, finally got in touch with us to explain that he had NO IDEA that we had reserved a tasting and asked us if we wouldn't mind rescheduling for a later time or day. In fact, this was not possible, as we were not planning to be in downtown Napa after 1pm, and we already planned on lunch at the Hog Island Oyster Bar at the Oxbow Market before checking into our hotel near Mount Veeder later that afternoon.
While Adam M. did cancel our Tock reservation promptly after we managed to get in touch with him, Day 1 of our Napa visit was seriously disrupted. My wife in particular was quite upset by the entire experience of standing outside a locked door on a chilly winter morning in an unfamiliar section of downtown Napa to which we had walked on foot from our parked vehicle at the Oxbow Market, approximately one mile away. She still has traumatic memories of standing in line for food as a child in Communist Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, and I believe the whole Gamling & McDuck fiasco triggered repressed feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, and mistrust - which is never a good way to begin an eagerly anticipated and exhaustively planned three day vacation to Napa Valley wine country, let me assure you.
Fortunately, the rest of our Napa Valley visit was awesome, from oysters, Dungeness crab, and Robert Sinskey Abraxas white wine at Oxbow to tastings and tours at Hess Collection and Trefethen Family Vineyards the next day to an amazing midday meal at La Calenda in Yountville and so much more.
As much as I would like to encourage you to give small, independently run wine operations like Gamling & McDuck a chance to impress with their audacious wines made from grapes like Chenin Blanc and Cabernet Franc (two of my favorite varietals, ironically enough), I can't recommend them until they figure out how Tock actually works so that you, too, don't end up standing outside of a locked door at 10am on a Thursday morning at the start of an otherwise auspicious new year.
I offer my apologies to Gabrielle S., Adam's wine partner, for having to write such a negative review. You likely deserve better. I hope to be able to submit a more positive update on Yelp later, should we be able to arrange a return visit to downtown Napa, when your lovely looking tasting room will not be locked and empty, so that we might instead be welcomed with the professional courtesy that we as your prospective customers probably should deserve.
Yours sincerely, Bradley N. of Woodside, California: a proud native son of the much maligned but often quite wonderful state of West Virginia, where wine tastings in a place as magical as Napa Valley exist only in the realm of the fevered hillbilly imagination. As Appalachians like me silently say to all we meet, "montani semper liberi," in the fervent hope that you and your loved ones will live long, happy lives of freedom, and that your glasses will never run dry, ever.
(*) The dubious honor of being the #1 worst wine tasting room related experience ever belongs to Ridge Vineyards, where they refused to let my wife (who was considerably older than 21 at the time) taste a vertical of Monte Bello red wine with me because she had left her driver's license in the car, a six mile hike away, at the trailhead parking on Page Mill Road, where we had departed two and half hours earlier. read more