Afton Mountain Vineyards — Attraction in Waynesboro

Arrived on 4/13/19 at 12:30 p.m. with 9 of my friends. We were turned away at the door because the older lady said reservations were required to be on the property for groups of 7 or more. THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE at the winery except for 10 women who were celebrating their sorority reunion. There were over 10 open tables in the tasting pavilion and the entire back patio was empty. In fact, some of the chairs were still stacked on top of one another. I told the lady that I understood that we may need a reservation for tastings, but could we buy bottles and sit on the patio or somewhere else on the property. She said "No! Large groups ruin the ambiance we try to create here." Then my friend asked, "What if we had come in two cars of five people each." The lady responded, "That would have been smart Ms. Manipulative." SO RUDE. If your winery is doing so well that you can turn away 5 lawyers, 2 accountants, 2 Phds and a DNP, who wanted to drink wine for 45 minutes, then God Bless you. But generally cash trumps ambiance every day of the week, so we went to Veritas and Kings Family instead and spent over $1,000 at each place. You also happened to turn away two prospective brides, both of whom are planning to get married in the Charlottesville area within the next year. (Note: that was one of the purposes of the trip was to scout out local wedding venues). So in sum, you may want to reconsider your business plan unless this winery is a vanity project. With the degree of rudeness and inflexibility we encountered, though, I'm not sure this place can...

Horrible customer service. Beware if you come with more than 3 people, they'll likely get flustered on how to serve you. We happened to stop by and when we saw it said groups of 6 or more required a reservation, we broke up our group of 12 into three groups of four for tastings. When you walk in, they require you to put your name on a list to do the tasting. We told the woman that we had three groups of four and she told us she wouldn't be able to accommodate us because they required reservations for groups that large. We said that wasn't a problem because we were fine with doing separate tastings of four people each and would even break down into couples if that was easier. The woman was rude and essentially told us if we came back in the future with a group that large without reservations, we would be turned away. She then told us to wait outside in the cold (even though they had a sitting area inside where another couple was waiting), and she would see what she could do. Needless to say we didn't do a tasting and will not be returning. We would have been a little more understanding had we gone on a nice day in the spring or summer and they were busy, but this place wasn't busy at all at the time. As someone who has gone to almost all of the wineries in the Charlottesville area with groups big and small during busy spring days and cold winter days, I've never received such...

After having visited Afton a number of times in the past - always making purchases of the $10 (increases to $15 for large groups) tasting in addition to at least two bottles of wine, specifically the Bacco and Gewurtz and even bringing friends traveling internationally to the US to this location, I decided to make a stop in with friends on a Saturday afternoon and was turned away.

What I did not realize that Afton, unlike many of the wineries/vineyards in this area, will rudely turn guests away if the party consists of 7 or more people. While our group was not interested in a tasting - we did plan on buying a few bottles of wine to take home and to share at the vineyard. When we were rudely turned away ("because we would congregate in the tasting room") by the representative at the entrance (he even fired back to leave a review), we took our business to veritas who happily provided the group with a tasting, 2 wine club sign-ups and 4 additional bottles of wine - totaling hundreds.

To note, our party was in 3 separate cars and we decided to meet at Afton - the representative let one car up to the vineyard to park and turned the other 2 away after he found out the group was 7. If you decide to arrive to afton in different vehicles, make sure to say your party is one car and do not divulge the entire group size if there are...