Wine Train woes hit close to home
Last weekend, when 11 women were kicked off the Napa Valley Wine Train for being “disruptive,” the incident took on a life of its own in social media, generating its own hashtag (#laughingwhileblack) and a slew of news reports in the local and national media.
Lisa Renee Johnson, the leader of the Antioch women’s book club, Sistahs on the Reading Edge, started posting on Facebook about the incident even as it was underway. “I felt like we were being transported back in time and these were tales my grandmother and great-grandmother should have been telling me about,” she was reported saying in the Press Democrat.
According to a Facebook post from the Wine Train that same afternoon, which cited “verbal and physical abuse towards other guests and staff,” the women were escorted through five train cars to exit at the St. Helena train station, where they were met by police. The officers determined the women were apparently not intoxicated, and had done no damage, so they left the scene.
The incident – and the following uproar – evoked an open apology from the Wine Train CEO, Tony Giacco. “The Napa Valley Wine Train was 100 percent wrong in its handling of this issue,” Giacco said. “We accept full responsibility for our failures and for the chain of events that led to this regrettable treatment of our guests.”
Their money was refunded, and Giacco even offered the mostly black book club a free train car for the club and its friends – 50 in all – on a future Wine Train journey.
Sonoma doesn’t have a wine train, but it does have the Sonoma Valley Wine Trolley and a lot of tasting rooms where groups of people come not just to sample wines, but to enjoy life, celebrate an occasion or maybe just have a little fun.
Several of those tasting rooms in the City of Sonoma are down an arcade known as Wine Alley. Bob Briner, one of the Two Amigos (with Squire Fridell, president of the Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers Alliance), grimaced when asked about the incident in Napa.
“Let’s face it, it’s a festive atmosphere in a tasting room,” he said. “Folks in here can become very raucous.” He said his response is generally to offer those who may have had too much to drink a glass of water, and suggest they sit down for a spell – though he did admit they had “the local gendarmes on speed-dial.”
The Wine Train incident had two sides, however – one being possible over-indulgence, the other being racism. The book club posted a video of them arriving at the Wine Train station in Napa at 11:45 a.m., excited and happy but not visibly drunk. They are, however, visibly black – at least 10 of the 11 club members on the sortie.
They were escorted off the train in St. Helena, 45 minutes into its up-valley journey, and again posted videos showing they are evidently still not drunk, and still black.
Briner said that racism had never been an issue in his tasting room, saying he welcomed diversity in the tasting room and in the wine club. “I enjoy ethnic diversity. I can’t think of a single incident, not one, where there’s been a problem.”
For tasting room personnel it’s more often than not the behavioral issues of being “rowdy” or “boisterous” – code words for inebriated – rather than black. It’s against federal law to discriminate against a person or group because of their ethnicity, but it’s essentially part of the job to rein in the rowdy.
“We have clear instructions not to serve people who may be drunk,” said Briner. “You’re very much at risk when you’re in the alcohol business.”
The Sonoma Valley Wine Trolley operates daily trips to four wineries aboard a replica San Francisco cable car year-round. The cars hold about 30 people, and while they are sometimes chartered the passengers are usually made up of mixed groups.
“They’re all there for the adventure, for the love of agriculture, for the experience of four distinct wineries,” said general manager Phil Boland. “We rarely have rowdy people; if they’re rowdy it means they’re having fun.”
The wine trolleys also operate in Napa Valley – in fact only about a third of their 12,000 annual customers ride in Sonoma, a ratio Boland ascribes to the fact that there are two itineraries in Napa, and only one in Sonoma. Still, in either county, he says they’ve never had to ask someone to leave the tour.
“They’re expected to act like ladies and gentlemen. Maybe that’s a passé term to use,” Boland said thoughfully. “You might find somebody who’s a little unruly, and you might have to say just tone it down a bit, but in five years we’ve never had to stop the trolley, kick someone off and say call a taxi.”
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