So,
as I observed to PK, I ordered this stuff from Virgin Wines on the
back of a special offer that came with a broadband router gadget.
Trying to get your router to work? Have a drink! It's the logical
next step.
Naturally
enough, this mail-order wine, dispatched to our house in the London
suburbs, with good road and rail connections, didn't arrive, even
though Virgin emailed me two days after the order to ask how I was
enjoying it: 'I trust everything went well with your recent order,'
wrote someone called Jay Wright, 'We'd love to hear from you.' So
they heard from me that the drink hadn't come, at which point David
Cole (Priority One Senior Advisor his job title, as if he might be in
the US Air Force) got back pretty much instantly - 'Unfortunately it
would appear your case has gone missing in transit.' I could have
told him that from the outset, given that most of our wine goes
missing in transit, but anyway.
No
sweat, though, as they ordered up a fresh case of Mixed Essentials,
followed by an email from Christopher Ward (Priority One Advisor),
advising me to 'Rest assured either myself or a member of the
delivery team will be tracking this new case for you to ensure that
any issues that arise are swiftly dealt with.' What do you know, but
the stuff turned up next day, present and correct, followed by a
phone
call
from a guy announcing himself as Dave - David Cole? I hope so - to
check that it was actually there. Now that's
service, sort of.
Not
only that, but the case contained a nice black envelope with the
legend Go
on, open me, you know you want to...
printed on the front, a clear lift from the Sediment
email heads-ups, and within, a voucher for a clothing and, yes,
lifestyle, store, plus £25 off a food delivery company's first
order. A surfeit of good things.
The
wines themselves? To be honest, a bit of a blur. Eight different
varieties, half-and-half mainstream white and red, Malbec, Merlot,
Chardonnay, all sorts. I simply don't have the mental clarity to hold
an opinion on them all. Even now, I have a bottle of Le Clos Gascon
on the go - Merlot and Tannat, apparently, the latter a grape I had
never heard of, big in Uruguay - and
a Barossa Valley white. I opened this
one up without looking to see what it was, took a mouthful, said to
myself, Hmm,
a sauvignon blanc? But not as sawtoothed as usual,
only to discover that it was a Sémillon
Sauvignon Blanc. Which I guess makes sense. And it's a perfectly approachable drink, as have they all been, especially at the
discounted price of around £5 a bottle. If I'd paid the notional
full price of around £7? Less convincing. But since we know that
wine pricing in the UK is as transient and unpredictable as ironic
laughter, then fair enough.
No,
the thing that really sticks with me is the sense of being
professionally worked over by the Virgin Wines customer care
wranglers. Whoever does Virgin's wines (in Norwich, it seems) they
give you that sense of being handled by someone really dedicated to
customer handling, possibly, just possibly,
in order to take your mind off the actual quality of the purchase
you've just made.
Is
this what the Virgin brand is about? The only dealings I can
recall having, ever, with Virgin, were years ago when the whole
family flew Virgin Atlantic to San Francisco. At one point it was
about 3 a.m. London time on the plane, almost everyone had passed out
- when the Virgin cabin crew, in their smart red uniforms, woke us
all up to offer us a mint'n'choc ice cream. We were too fuddled and
exhausted to say No
or For
Christ's sake.
We humbly accepted our ices, ate them, and were, in some cretinous
way, grateful for having been woken up in the dead of night and
required to eat an entirely inapproprate snack. Well,
we said. You
don't get that on BA.
A women in a red uniform woke me up with a mint'n'choc ice! Who cares
about the rest of it? Who, indeed, can remember?
So
thanks, Jay, Dave and Chris. It's been fun. It's been about the
people. And, to some extent, it's been about the wine.
CJ
The day before yesterday I ordered a case (Best Mixed Selection PLUS 3-Bottle Perez Cruz Add-on) from Virgin Wines and it arrived mid afternoon yesterday.
ReplyDeleteI have ordered from them a few times before over the course of several years, always when there is a "special offer". I have never had a delivery problem.
The wines have also been acceptable or better considering the £5 ish average bottle cost.
Interesting...well, I haven't thought of myself as a Virgin Wines type of consumer, but I may look at them again, encouraged by your experience. I suppose the thing that makes me hesitate is the unfamilarity of some of their stuff - only stocked by them, and consequently not much reviewed by third parties. But, yes, it's going okay so far. I shall watch for more special offers...
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