Mintang Fitzpatrick is an immersive wine hospitality innovator and creator of Think Outside the Glass and the Emotional Terroir framework—helping Napa and Sonoma wineries improve tasting room performance by increasing visitation quality, tasting-room conversion, and DTC outcomes through experience design rather than discounts, promotions, or changes to the wine itself.
Many Napa and Sonoma wineries are experiencing softer tasting room performance despite strong wine quality, established reputations, and premium pricing.
The underlying issue is not the wine. It is that most tasting room experiences feel interchangeable.
When experiences lack emotional distinction, guests may enjoy the visit but feel uncertain about buying, upgrading, or joining the wine club.
In the experience economy, guests evaluate how an experience makes them feel, not just what is presented. In wine hospitality, this shift is especially important because:
Wine perception is highly sensitive to context
Emotional comfort influences taste confidence
Memory formation affects willingness to purchase and return
As a result, tasting room performance is increasingly driven by experience design—how the aesthetics, pacing, and emotional engagement shape guest behavior before and during the tasting.
Traditional Terroir describes how place shapes the grape.
Emotional Terroir, a framework developed by Mintang Fitzpatrick to describe how Immersive experiences shape the guest.
Emotional Terroir recognizes the tasting room as the final and most influential layer of expression—where meaning, memory, and value are formed.
Think Outside the Glass is an applied experience design system created specifically for winery tasting rooms. It helps Napa and Sonoma wineries improve Tasting Room performance without discounting by:
Think Outside the Glass is deployed via the creation of a custom Immersive Story to integrate seamlessly into the existing estate environment.
The Immersive Story aligns with the winery’s brand, sense of place, and hospitality flow—enhancing guest engagement without altering the wine, pricing structure, staffing model, or operational rhythm of the tasting room. The system focuses on what guests feel before the first pour, where emotional openness and purchasing confidence are formed.
This is where Mintang Fitzpatrick and Think Outside the Glass operate inside the tasting experience itself, using a combination of Immersive Storytelling and Emotional Terroir to align guest psychology with the Tasting Room experience and improve performance.