Love is in the air at Fisher Vineyards....Cheers

We love what we do! We thoroughly enjoy making a lifetime of memories. We're very confident that are winery partners are the best in the world and they "get it"! We know the wine is good, that's the easy part but it takes a good group of people to make something happen like this.

We had the pleasure of doing a wine dinner with Fisher Vineyards, MasterCard and Continental Airlines a few months ago in Houston, TX and we had the pleasure of spending time with Kai And Shelby. They mentioned they would be going to Napa and Sonoma however Kai threw a fun curve ball, they were planning on getting engaged. First thing we started thinking about was "how exciting" this was going to be! Now time to get to work and put the pieces of the puzzle together!

Kai and Shelby gave us the permission to share their wonderful story and we can't thank them enough! As our strategic partner MasterCard says, "Priceless".....

Dear Destination Cellars,

Shelby and I are thrilled to announce that we are engaged! I think all engagements are exciting, but I believe ours is hard to top with the amazing location and events you put together for my proposal. We arrived at the beautiful Fisher Vineyards under the premise that I had reserved a special wine tasting for the two of us. We were greeted in the drive by Catherine Fisher, the daughter of the owners, and their head of marketing. She couldn’t have been more warm and welcoming, and made us feel like we had the entire place to ourselves – which we actually did! She then showed us into their cellar where her sister Whitney, the Fisher winemaker, and her apprentice were waiting on us for our own private blending session. After a brief introduction to wine blending, Shelby and I each teamed up with a winemaker and competed to see who could blend the best wine. Cameron came by a bit later to be the judge. No surprise to me, Shelby won the blind tasting. She didn’t know at that time, however, that you had already organized to have 4 cases of the wine she blended to be bottled and shipped to me for our engagement dinner. That was a big surprise for everyone later in the day.

Once we were done marveling at Shelby’s winemaking skills, Cameron took us up to the top of the hill in their aptly named Wedding Vineyard. She graciously gave us a bottle of Fisher Chardonnay, and excused herself to get ready for our wine tasting. We sat in two Adirondack chairs, looking out over San Francisco bay, on a gorgeous blue sky day, sipping some amazing wine, and discussed what our life would be like together. Of course, I couldn’t let the moment pass any longer, so I got down on one knee at the top of the vineyard and proposed. She was so excited she could only hug and kiss me, and tell me that she loved me. I did end up reminding her that she needed to say yes, which she whole heartedly did! We stayed on top of the hill for a while longer to soak it all in, and then made our way down back to the Fisher’s house where Shelby was in for another surprise. She was thrilled to see that our families had arrived to celebrate with us – her parents, her brother and his wife, and my parents were all waiting on us already toasting with Cameron and Mrs. Fisher. We celebrated in the beautiful courtyard while Mrs. Fisher baked delicious pizzas in an outdoor oven for us to have while we tasted the various Fisher wines – all of which are outstanding!

It was an incredibly wonderful evening, and I am so thankful that you were able to arrange it all to go off without a hitch. Your communications to me leading up to the big day were excellent, and I never felt more prepared for such a once in a lifetime event. Shelby, our families, and I all want to say thank you for making our engagement a truly everlasting incredible memory.

Warmest Regards,


Kai and Shelby

Delivering Happiness and Creating Loyal Customers

While sitting in the airport waiting for my flight, I had the pleasure of picking up the book, "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh CEO, Zappos.com, Inc. I'm not a reader but I felt compelled to purchase this book for some reason. The title stood out to me and now four days later, I'm almost finished with the book. You're probably asking yourself, "why is he writing about this and what does it have to do with wine?"

Our ultimate goal when we started the company in late 2006 was to deliver happiness, create lifetime memories and provide an amazing experience the revolved around the world of wine.

The last statistic we read stated there's over 250,000 different wines now offered in the United States from around the world. That's just an amazing amount of wine however that's a LOT of choices for the consumer.

* Do they buy the wine for the ratings?
* Do they buy the wine for the label?
* Do they buy the wine for the region?
* Do they buy the wine for the varietal?

There's many reasons why people buy wine but we believe an experience is defined as, "the people, the property and the wine". The Hoff Family certainly have amazing people working with them, they have a wonderful property and clearly they're making wonderful wine. Can't go wrong with great grapes and Heidi Barrett as your winemaker. We're always confident about the wine, we only work with wineries producing great wine however what we need to always make sure of is that they understand what "our" definition of an experience is all about.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with a client of ours last night and yes of course we enjoyed a great bottle of wine from one of our winery partners but our client said "let's go to the wine cellar, I have to show you something". As we're walking to the cellar, he had an artist come in to paint a picture of a bottle of wine which happened to be 2007 Fantesca Chardonnay. Not only did he say, "it's my wife's favorite wine but we had such an amazing experience when we visited the property. It was beautiful and the people were great".

Goes back to us saying, "it's about the people, the property and the wine". We sent our client back in September to eight wineries over a span of three days but he felt compelled to have an artist paint this great picture in his cellar so he could relive their amazing experience at Fantesca.

You can go to your local shoe store to buy your shoes but Zappos.com made a decision to make "customer service" their #1 priority. It wasn't about discounting, it was about helping the customer and giving them a wonderful experience. They ended up creating incredible loyal customers that in return helped them grow their company.

Our goal is simple, to provide incredible customer service, create amazing experiences that lead to a lifetime of memories and put a lot of smiles on people's faces. We know the wine is good but the rest of the pieces need to fall into place in order to have a magical experience. That experience could be at the winery or in your personal home but it has to be with "great people".
If you ever wish to experience the world of wine, let us know!

If you want to learn more about us, you can visit our website at http://www.destinationcellars.com/

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Cheers and here's to creating a lifetime of memories and amazing experiences around the world of wine!

Regards,

David Keuhner
Founder/CEO
Destination Cellars
"It's About The Experience"
davidk@destinationcellars.com
(866) 920-9463

Wine in the box continues from Taiwan to Chicago

And we thought boxed wine was only for the holidays! Boxes continue to flow throughout the world and the beauty is, they're filled with our winery partners wines! Incredible wines from our partners Clark Claudon, Vineyard 7&8, Lail Vineyards, Mirror, Hestan Vineyards and many others have been traveling as far as Taiwan, Shanghai, Mexico and all over the United States!

What's nice is we can help assemble just about anything. Whether it's your birthday, anniversary, client appreciation or employee incentive, just let us know! We're happy to work with your budget and we certainly know there will be some good wine in there!

Cheers and thanks again! Let us know if you have any questions, you can contact us at wine@destinationcellars.com or look us up at http://www.destinationcellars.com/