Customer reviews of Vignerons d’Exception

Hello Sir, and thank you for your confidence. This is not a joke, it's a UPS Portugal screw-up. Please accept our deepest apologies. We don't work in France or anywhere else, and refuse to accept any parcel relays or other insecure solutions for top-quality wines. Unfortunately, you live in Portugal and the UPS driver in charge of your city of Alcochete has deliberately decided, without our authorization, to leave your wine in one of his parcel relays after trying in vain to deliver it to you. This is what they admit, even though we never asked them to do anything of the sort. We will no longer ship with UPS in Portugal (in other countries it works perfectly), so let's hope the new provider will respect our requests... And once again, please accept our deepest apologies. Tristan Depauw

Dear Sir, first of all, thank you for taking the time to bring this information to our attention. Our Paris-area carrier obviously doesn't brag when it doesn't do its job properly. We apologize for his unacceptable behavior, and will immediately "put things right". In fact, this is a small company which is supposed to respect our requests for appointments, etc., since it's not a big computerized machine as it often is. They're even willing to go upstairs and down to the cellar, which is hardly ever the case with other delivery companies, especially for wine. It seems that one of the drivers got a bit carried away with the instructions (day + time!), and this will not go unchallenged. We apologize again, and should you be so kind as to place your trust in us again despite this pitiful experience, please be assured that we'll be particularly vigilant when it comes to delivery... We can only hope that the wines are at least to your taste... and that you enjoy them all!

Thank you for taking the time to rate us "nothing to complain about, 2*/5". We wish you all the best. Hopefully, in a few years, you will appreciate these wines and will not regret your purchase. We would like to take advantage of this public response to point out that we are available to our customers from 8:30 am to 7:30 pm by telephone and email to advise them according to their tastes and budgets. We taste all the wines we sell, so we can help our customers avoid buying "brands" that are not easy to find, but which are in demand by many wine-lovers who appreciate them and don't find them too expensive (all tastes are natural). We're even more than willing to suggest young winemakers with unbeatable value for money to those who want to discover them! If you don't want to be disappointed, please contact us before ordering, rather than randomly buying wines that others are snapping up and whose price/pleasure ratio you won't appreciate. Tristan Depauw

Dear Sir, please accept our apologies, and we regret that you have waited for the publication of "verified reviews" to inform us of your disappointment. Please do not hesitate to contact us directly if you encounter any inconvenience. However, as you requested, we had shipped at the beginning of the week to avoid the wine spending the weekend in an unsuitable place (as our freight forwarder specializes in wine, the storage places for our cartons, between two trucks, are usually suitable). Nevertheless, you have noted our 2*/5 service: we delivered the original box from the estate! We're sorry that the carrier mistreated your boxes, and "almost stole them from you" (if that's what "fell off the truck" means) because the box was original and therefore poorly chosen by the winemaker (domaine de Terrebrune in Bandol or Juliette Joblot in Givry in this case). We're among those who prefer to avoid wastage, repackaging in polystyrene or cardboard and throwing away the original box. Damage is very rare, and we're sorry it's happened to you, but we don't agree with throwing out all the cartons and putting all the wines we sell back in beautiful new ones so they don't get damaged or stolen (would that really change the outcome of abuse and theft?). And what about the planet? Of course, when something does go wrong (statistics for 2021: 0.3% of deliveries), we cover all the costs of re-delivery, replacement in the event of breakage, and so on. We think this is sufficient, and we're sure you'll agree. In any case, should you place your trust in us again, we will take particular care to monitor the carrier closely to ensure that he respects your boxes and delivers them to you under normal conditions. Once again, we apologize for this inconvenience. Yours sincerely, Tristan Depauw

Dear Sir, thank you for your review and the 2/5 rating for your third order (I hope you were satisfied with the first two, for which you unfortunately didn't leave a review, perhaps because everything went so well?) Indeed, the carrier broke a box, which happens on average in 0.5% of our deliveries. Unfortunately, it was the last in our stock, and the winemaker had run out of it too. As a result, after a telephone exchange and your agreement to this solution, we delivered another very similar but indeed not identical vintage, from the same estate but from a neighboring clos, and refunded the difference of €1 per bottle. Unfortunately, this is a rare occurrence, and we apologize again for this inconvenience, a rare combination of two very unintentional factors: a breakage and, what's more, the breakage of the last box in our stock! Yours sincerely, Tristan Depauw, president and founder of Vignerons d'Exception.

Thank you Sir for taking the time to give us your feedback. Indeed, this gift delivery was a fiasco from start to finish, and we have no excuses. The Schenker carrier not only broke the package, but then hid it from us, which didn't allow us to react as quickly as we should have to send back another box of wine. Then, the bad faith of the carrier (it's very difficult to find a serious one in the Vaucluse) continued, and we finally managed to have the parcel delivered before Christmas, but not without threats to the carrier. In short, while 99% of our deliveries go smoothly, it seems that everything focused on this one to make it a real ordeal, and we're deeply sorry about that. We have since taken exceptional measures to monitor all deliveries from this department very closely. Tristan Depauw

Dear Madam, we always do our utmost to remain "zen" no matter how our customers behave, even if they treat us like animals (after all, the customer is king and we're just "suppliers"). Unfortunately, in some cases - fortunately very rare - it's hard to obey. Sorry about that.

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to write a comment. Indeed, as this is a gift, we always send a letter by post before shipping the wines. This lets the recipient know they're getting something they didn't order, so they can't refuse it. It also allows you to attach your personalized note, so the recipient knows who's giving the gift. When the gift arrives, the recipient knows who to thank. Finally, our company name is always on the parcel, so that the recipient can call us in case they haven't received the mail beforehand. We mailed this as "priority", as we do every time, but unfortunately it may not have been opened or read? Or did the post office lose it and it never arrived? We're sorry about that, and especially sorry to have "collected" a 2/5 because of La Poste... or a gift recipient who didn't pay attention to our mail, it happens sometimes. Fortunately, the delivery went smoothly and the recipient knew that the gift had come from you without having to contact us. Thank you again for your trust, Tristan Depauw

Dear Sir, we regret this unfortunate experience and must detail the very exceptional and totally unforeseeable nature of the error you suffered. A rare error, but one for which we apologize once again, as we have already done by email and telephone. You had ordered our latest box of Stéphane Ogier's Condrieu 2017, a wine that was also sold out at the domaine, and therefore difficult to replace in a few days. The carrier, understaffed and completely disorganized (like all carriers) in this period of confinement, reversed one of your three cartons with that of another customer. The other customer told us "he wasn't quite sure, but had received nothing abnormal" obviously, the wine he had ordered - and which you received - was worth four times less than your Condrieu which was delivered to him instead. This customer refused to allow us to send the carrier to his home to rectify the error. In short, all we could do was ask the winemaker if he could sell us a case of his 2017 Condrieu from his personal cellar, so that we could deliver it to you. The winemaker was difficult to reach personally during this period of strong vine growth, and his employee couldn't make this kind of decision for him. He kindly agreed to sell us the box and ship it to us. All this takes time and we explained it to you by phone, you also told us that you understood the situation and that there was no hurry. We received it yesterday May 7 (you may have seen it if you subscribe to our newsletter: we were announcing the arrival of our long-awaited restocking at Stéphane Ogier), a month after the fact, and are confused. In fact, not only the quality (cf. the inversion of which you were a victim) but also the carriers' lead times have been extended during this difficult period. It was risky to send you wine on the eve of a long weekend, given the current disorganization of the carriers, and we thought it preferable to wait until Monday May 11th to send you this box... Fortunately, this kind of very exceptional circumstance happens very rarely... and unfortunately it happened to you, for which we apologize once again. You will soon hear from the carrier who will come and carry out the planned exchange. I hope to have the opportunity to show you that our delivery service is also capable of the best in the future. Best regards, Tristan Depauw

Dear Sir, First of all, please accept our apologies for this "catastrophic delivery" which we discovered with your message. In the future, please do not hesitate to let us know immediately, as we will do our utmost to compensate for the temporary summer weaknesses of our carrier, who specializes in wine and has a reputation for reliability. Unfortunately, during the summer, some temps are not up to scratch... and we're sorry to hear that this has "fallen" on you. Having been unable to contact you for several days, we immediately launched an investigation with the carrier, who was careful not to inform us of any malfunction. Finally, I hope you'll give us another chance to check for yourself that this was an isolated malfunction, far removed from our standard of service quality. Once again, please accept our apologies. Sincerely, Tristan Depauw.

Dear Sir, after 8 orders placed on our site for a total of 121 bottles, delivered each time within a few days without a hitch, you take up your pen to award us 2*/5 because the carrier made a mistake that you haven't forgiven: he forgot the cartons of your 9th order for three days in a corner of his warehouse (dedicated to wine and therefore in the best storage conditions) before showing up to deliver them to you. We're sorry about this, as we already told you at the time of delivery. We promise to deliver within "a week or so" and this time it took us 8 days to deliver, a time you described as "crazy". In fact, it takes us 2 days to deliver to Paris because we have a direct link every day from Burgundy, but for the rest of France it's slower because the wines are handled in their original cartons (or wooden cases) by humans, not machines, and make stops at regional redeployment centers where small trucks sometimes wait a day or two so as not to go "empty" to a remote location. Hence our one-week lead time. Our national carrier is a wine specialist with warehousing facilities designed to keep wine in good condition during the latency between two trucks. Express carriers" apart from the fact that they don't always insure the bottles, impose special packaging that must be able to fall from 2m high onto automated chains: the wine is first handled "by the bottle" for repackaging in this not very environmentally friendly packaging, it is then violated on automated sorting lines "high speed" and is not always stored in good conditions by general carriers who do not manage the temperature of their warehouses in summer for example.
As well as being the author of the dithyrambic prose on Thursdays, I'm also responsible for wine selection and customer satisfaction (which I regret I can't deliver all over France myself!). I think I have always satisfied you since our first contact in November 2016 (reservations of rare wines, grouping of several orders to benefit from free delivery, etc. I counted 20 email exchanges between us for 9 orders), so I find you quite harsh to only note THE bad experience - which is obviously one too many - without taking into account the previous good ones. I hope that when you uncork a bottle, those first 8 deliveries will come back to you... and that time will diminish the bad experience of this 9th delayed delivery... so that you can then call on our services again, and verify that it was indeed an isolated error. Enjoy your tastings! Sincerely, Tristan Depauw "le patron" ;-)

Dear Sir, first of all thank you for your confidence, I hope we'll have the opportunity to make up for it on a future delivery... The carrier - who specializes in wine - is supposed to call you beforehand to arrange a delivery slot that suits you, and this is what he does in the vast majority of cases, throughout France... but perhaps a little less so in the PACA region, I must admit. Unfortunately, he didn't keep his promise, and we're going to start investigating immediately to find out why, so as to avoid this mistake happening again in the future. Please accept our apologies once again... and we hope you'll give us another chance. We also hope you enjoy the Crozes-Hermitage and Saint-Joseph you received, and that they make you forget the inconvenience of not being called, and the bad behavior of that delivery man. Ah, if only we could get behind them!