The Unreal Meal

For so many of us, food and wine are a natural complement.  Hell, it’s so natural that there’s a magazine with that name.  So it shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise to me when I got an e-mail this morning from Tasting Table sharing knowledge of a new wine club with a new twist (more on that in a minute).

Wine clubs are a dime a dozen these days (or, more likely, about $45 a two-pack of bottles).  Various vineyards have their own clubs, lots of resellers have them, it’s a fairly common way to introduce myriad selections to people who might be regular wine drinkers who like a little variety.  I, myself, have been a wine.com subscriber for a couple years.  Sometimes they send good things, sometimes it’s average.  My problem with wine.com is that they tend to overcharge for things, and their customer service is not always the best.  Plus, they sell out of popular things way too fast.

Keeping that in mind, I haven’t actively been looking for a new wine club, but Mama always taught me to keep my options open and be receptive to things that might cross my path.  Enter in this morning’s Tasting Table e-mail that talked of a new joint venture between Cookstr and Pasanella & Sons Vintners.

Cookstr is a fantastically well designed recipe database that features recipes from a lot of famous chefs and cookbook authors in one handy website.  Pasanella & Sons (I really need to stop resisting the urge to type panzanella – also delicious, but totally different) is a local wine shop here in NYC in, I believe, what used to be the old South Street fish market.  Combine the two, and you obviously have food and wine, but you get something more with their new service: a wine club plus a book club — a cookbook club, to be precise.  You get a bottle of red, a bottle of white, and (apologies to Billy Joel), a book with which to cook tonight.

I was so enamored of this idea (I’m a bit of a sucker for cookbooks, which is ironic since I don’t use them that often) that I immediately went to the site in the hopes of signing up for a new ongoing membership that could replace my wine.com shipment.  When I got there, they had a few options: a one-time month-only choice for $49.99, a 3-month option for $149.99, 6 months for $299.99, and 12 months for $599.99.  What was missing was a month-by-month option where I could subscribe on an ongoing basis, but without having to shell out six hundred smackeroos.

Doing what any enterprising woman might, I clicked the link associated with questions and comments, and e-mailed asking if this was an option or if it might become an option in the future.  I sent my e-mail at 12:50 this afternoon.  Ten minutes later, Will Schwalbe, the CEO and founder of Cookstr, responded to say that they didn’t have the ability quite yet, but would likely figure it out soon, and that he’d follow up with another e-mail once they did.

I was tickled and, quite frankly, a little stunned to have such a fast and amiable response!  Then I got sucked into various work duties (after all, I can’t spend every minute of my workday on fun stuff!), and before I knew it, I had another e-mail from Marco Pasanella thanking me for such a great idea and letting me know that he’d added that option to their website.

Let me tell you guys, I’ve worked in some sort of service industry (either food or customer) for my entire adult life, and I know two definitive things about it:  First, it’s incredibly easy to provide great service to customers if you’re simply responsive.  Second, in spite of that fact, it’s something that very very very many people neglect.  I don’t know if it’s because they’re just lazy or careless or what the story is, but more and more, I find that people are clueless about what constitutes good service.

Happily, Will and Marco do not fall into that second category!  I was so thrilled by their nearly immediate responses and actions, that I instantly signed up for the shiny new month-by-month program.  I cannot wait for the first shipment, and my first cookbook!

The practical upshot is this: food and wine are delicious, but there’s no substitute for great service.  And since they so willingly accommodated my wishes, I felt that I should do my part to get their name out there to more people that might be interested in the Vino & Cookbook of the Month Club.  You don’t have to be a New Yorker to join!

Once I have my first shipment, I’ll have to find something delectable from the cookbook that will go nicely with the wine they send.  Perhaps a nice bread salad would do.