We recently visited the Mansfield area in Victoria Australia for three days and I wanted to share my experiences.
We stayed at the Grand Mercure Pinnacle Valley Resort in a one bedroom apartment.
http://www.pvr.com.au/There are also Chalets and other room types available.
The resort was pleasant and had a restaurant with a small high quality menu. Although it's in a hilly spot walking around the local surrounds was well worth the effort and the pool was a welcome way to cool down.
Driving up we had lunch at Di Bortoli in the yarra valley
http://www.debortoli.com.au/cellar-door/yarra-valley.htmlThe wine tasting was conducted by efficient and helpful staff and the lunch was a "white tablecloth" affair with high quality appropriately priced food and wines.
It was sobering to drive through the bushfire effected areas of the Yarra Valley.
After a pleasant evening and morning at the resort we went out to Kinloch Estate Winery.
http://www.kinlochwines.com.au/home2.htmThe wines were average at best and the cellar door staff were the same, tastes were remarkably small as well. We were somewhat taken aback to note that their menu included a charge of $10 if you ate there without buying any of their wines, and a charge of $5 per bottle on top of the cellar door pricing if you did!
But the tasting plates on the menu sounded great and we were there for lunch so we pressed on. Warning bells started to go off for me when the waitress taking our order wasn't writing anything down and made two mistakes when reading our order back to us! Why can't people just write things down?
Alarm bells continued to ring when five tasting plates were brought out with four baskets of
bread. We got a dirty look when we asked why there were only four baskets instead of five and she said "I put the bread for the table into four baskets but just ask me if you need more", my wife immediately asked for a fifth basket but one did not arrive, neither did a drink which had been ordered previously.
The food, by the way, was excellent.
Eventually the bread at the table ran out and we asked for more which arrived promptly, the missing drink arrived after being asked for again, once again an indication that a pad and pen would be a good investment! Then when we got the bill we'd been charged $6 for a cake no-one ordered or had and $4.50 for "extra bread". When we questioned they modified the 'cake' into a 'coke' and said "we put five platters worth of bread in the four baskets so we charged you for more". So we were supposed to walk around the table and get our bread from the four baskets then?? I could go on more about this but I think I've carried on about it enough already, suffice to say the whole thing left a bad taste in our mouths and nobody from that group of 12 will be going back to Kinloch. We purchased a total of two bottles of wine from them.
We had another enjoyable evening at the resort - a table of 12 to celebrate an important birthday was handled very well.
The following morning we went out to Delatite Winery.
http://www.delatitewinery.com.au/The experience couldn't have been any more different to Kinloch. The wine and cellar door staff were both excellent. Although there was only one type of platter (Kinloch offered several) the platter itself was generous, cheap and included two glasses of wine. Best of all there were no ridiculous charges for combination's of buying or not buying their wine. The staff even called their friends for us to find out about road closures as well as information about another local product we were looking for, and where to buy it. As a result the group bought 8 cases of wine and several people joined their wine club. We will all be going back!
The message here is simple - penny pinching and poor customer service will COST YOU in the end!
