I chastised myself for considering pushing off this trip to California to sit around and wait for a man. This was exactly the reason I wasn't in a relationship in the first place. Business had to come first.
I booked my flight to San Francisco and then a little puddle jumper from there up to wine country. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed time away. Time away from thinking about Max, as well as time away from Las Vegas.
Saturday morning, I woke early, preparing to leave for the airport. My nerves were a jumble in my stomach. Nervousness before meeting the client wasn't unusual, but this time, I almost felt sick.
I made it to the airport in time, and the flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco was uneventful. The flight from San Francisco to wine country was a little bumpier, but that was to be expected in smaller planes. Still, it didn't help my stomach any. When I got off the plane, a woman greeted me as I headed toward the small terminal building.
"Ms. Dunsmore?"
I nodded and held out my hand. "Yes, I'm Amelia Dunsmore."
She gave my hand a quick sturdy shake. "I'm Lara Winthrop. It's nice to meet you. Thank you for coming."
“Winthrop?” Winthrop was the name of the winery.
She smiled. "It's a family business. My dad is running it, but I plan to take over someday. It was my idea that we hire a social media expert. We don't want to get left behind."
She wasn't the person I'd been dealing with, but clearly, she was important. And because she was here personally greeting me, I felt important as well.
I nodded. "I'm here to help make sure that you don't."
She drove me in her sleek little Audi out into the countryside, once covered with trees but now covered with vines. The Winthrop winery was exactly like one might expect. It had hundred-year-old Italian architecture surrounded by gardens and natural beauty.
"I'll give you a tour of the winery and the vineyards a little bit later. Our main house is a little bit further up the road, and we have a guesthouse there for you to stay while you're here."
As she drove us toward the main house, she recounted the history of the vineyard, starting from the Italian immigrant who had brought a few grape vines with him from Tuscany. The Winthrop family bought it just over fifty years ago, and it had stayed in the family ever since. Of course, I knew all this because I did my research. But I listened because there was so much more to be gained by the client giving me information than reading it on the Internet. In her tone, I heard pride in her family and excitement to be the next generation preparing to take it over.
She dropped me off at the guesthouse and gave me time to settle in before we were off on a tour of the winery and the vineyard. I used my phone to take pictures and write notes as marketing ideas came to me.
That evening, I was invited to the main house for dinner. Her parents were there, along with Lara, the foreman, Mr. Serrano, and a business manager, Mr. Laszlo, who had been the one I'd been talking to until Lara picked me up this morning.
The family was friendly, yet formal. I wondered if that was because I was here or if they were always like that. When I was a little girl, before my mom left, dinners were what I imagined state dinners at the White House were like. We had to dress up, and we were served by people wearing white coats. My mom had been a fan of historical dramas, and I think she wanted to live like the aristocrats did over a century ago.
"Lara isn’t going to have to start dancing in videos, is she?" Mrs. Winthrop asked once our plates were served.
I understood where the question was coming from. Social media was always changing, but sometimes, some of the trends were odd to people older than me.
"Not unless she wants to,” I said.
Lara laughed, but her mother frowned.
I cleared my throat. "One of the most successful social media influencers of today got his start talking about wine on the Internet. But I can tell you he never danced."
"What does it involve?" her mother asked, and I could see she was distressed that this newfangled social media thing was going to hurt the winery's reputation.
"Social media is like other forms of marketing, except it's more immediate and accessible to your market. It allows your market to learn more about you and even engage with you. We could create campaigns around the process of the wine being created, from caring for the vines, all the way to the bottle hitting the table of the consumer. This can be done with a series of photos or short videos. Another idea would be to feature each wine with a meal pairing. What would be the best wine to have with salmon, for example? There's really a lot of different things we could do."
I studied the table to gauge their responsiveness. Most of them were nodding. Mrs. Winthrop still didn't look convinced.
"With the holidays coming, there could be campaigns on the best wines to give as a gift or when you're invited to a holiday party. There could be a campaign designed to teach people how to taste and understand the subtleties of wine. They can become armchair sommeliers."
Mrs. Winthrop frowned. "Armchair?"
"A play on the term ‘armchair detective’. The person who stays at home and helps solve mysteries. In this case, it would be people at home becoming wine experts by learning from you and your wines."
"I think all those ideas are fantastic." Lara smiled at me, I suspected to give me encouragement.
"I have to concur," Mr. Laszlo said. He was a little bit older than me by fifteen years or so. But he wasn’t so much older than he didn't understand the power of social media.