It's always a gamble with Groupon/Scoopon/Living Social deals; either you're restricted to certain days or times, eating from a restricted menu, shoved off into the scabs corner and treated accordingly, or you are warmly welcomed and treated to the full experience as though you paid full price.
Happily, we received the latter on our visit to Kies Family Winery, just out of Lyndoch in the Barossa Valley.
My friend had bought a Groupon voucher for a wine and cheese tasting experience as part of my birthday present and it was on a beautiful spring day we headed up to the Barossa which is really ridiculously close to my house; it takes about as long to get to Lyndoch as it does to get to IKEA. We pulled up to the small winery at the same time as a coachload of wine tourers who crowded the winery bar area and made us wonder if we were going to get to get rushed or crowded out of our experience. When we introduced ourselves to the owners, we were shown through to the Monkey Nuts Café area where a table awaited, all nicely set up with our glasses, tasting notes and a board of beautifully presented cheeses.
We were given a brief history of the sixth-generation owned family winery business and the wine varieties as they were poured out and then left to our own devices to enjoy moving through the five wines on offer, accompanied by a matched cheese ranging from goat chevre, cheddar, feta, brie and blue. The tasting sizes were generous for both wine and cheese and we took our time nibbling and sipping through the different flavours and throwing out adjectives like "fruity", "cheeky", "honeyish", "gravelly", "dark" and "long".
After we had finished, we moved through to the bar area, tasted a few more varieties and chatted to one of the owners who was himself the sixth generation of his family's winemakers. When we mentioned we had picked up some bargains in the local thrift shops that day, he recommended a big Salvos that we could visit in Gawler on our way home which we duly did and availed ourselves of more bargains.
Our Groupon also included a small bottle of the winery's Bastardo port as a souvenir and I bought a bottle of the Riesling which was fun and fresh, unlike most old-school yellow, sickly sweet varieties.
This is a prime example of how businesses should treat their voucher customers as not only am I happy to relate my pleasant experience to family, friends and the Yelping world but I would be happy to return and spend more time and money there in the future. read more