The main thing stopping people enjoying winery visits is a fear of looking ignorant, which is a shame because almost nobody at a winery cares whether you know anything. They care whether you're interested.
Here's what I've learned from a lot of these, including the mistakes.
Book, actually book
The single most common failure. Small producers are working operations, often with three or four staff, and turning up unannounced during harvest is an imposition that will get you a polite but brief reception.
Larger commercial operations with dedicated visitor centres will take walk-ins. Small family estates generally won't, or will do it grudgingly. Email a week ahead, say how many people, and mention if anyone's particularly interested in something specific.
Also: don't book five wineries in a day. Three is plenty and two is often better. The visits are between an hour and two, there's driving between them, and by the fourth you're not tasting anything properly.
The driving problem
Worth stating plainly because people get this wrong. Wine regions are rural, public transport is usually poor, and drink-driving limits are strict.
The solutions are a designated driver, a hired driver, a tour, or staying somewhere within walking distance of a few producers. Spitting helps a lot but tasting eight wines at four wineries and spitting everything still means absorbing more than nothing.
I've been in a car with somebody who thought they were fine and wasn't, and it's not worth it.
Spitting is normal
New visitors often feel rude spitting out wine they've been given. It isn't rude, it's expected, and there will be a bucket or a spittoon.
Everyone in the industry does it. If you're tasting more than three or four wines you should too, and the person pouring will think better of you rather than worse.
The technique is unglamorous — take a small amount, taste, then purse your lips and direct it firmly into the bucket rather than dribbling. It's worth practising at home once so your first attempt isn't in front of a winemaker.
Questions that get good answers
The generic questions get generic answers. These ones tend to open things up.
"What was the last vintage that gave you real trouble, and what did you do about it?" Winemakers love talking about difficult years and this usually produces the most interesting fifteen minutes of a visit.
"What have you changed in the last five years?" Reveals what they're actually thinking about, rather than the standard tour narrative.
"Which of these do you drink at home?" Almost always a different answer to the flagship wine, and often the best value bottle on the list.
"What's the youngest you'd drink this, and what's the oldest?" Practical, and gets you a genuine answer about ageing rather than marketing copy.
"What do you make that you can't sell?" Slightly cheeky, occasionally produces something remarkable from a corner of the cellar.
Questions to skip
"What's your best wine?" — They'll say the most expensive one. It's a closed question.
"Is this organic?" as an opening — Fine to ask, but leading with it can read as an audit rather than curiosity. Ask about farming practices generally and you'll get a fuller answer.
Anything comparing them to a famous neighbour, unless you know them well. It's a minefield.
The buying question
You are under no obligation to buy. Many wineries now charge a tasting fee, often refundable against a purchase, which resolves the awkwardness cleanly.
That said, buying something is a decent courtesy after an hour of somebody's time, and cellar-door pricing on small production wines is frequently the only way to get them at all.
Be realistic about transport. Wine is heavy and glass breaks. Check your airline's rules and your destination's import allowances before buying a case, and consider whether the producer ships.
The heat problem
A specific practical warning. Wine left in a hot car for an afternoon can be genuinely damaged — temperatures inside a parked vehicle in summer routinely exceed forty degrees, which will cook wine and can push corks.
If you're buying during a day of visits, ask if you can collect on the way back, or at minimum keep the bottles in the footwell with the air conditioning on rather than in the boot.
What a good visit gives you
The value isn't the tasting, which you could largely replicate by buying the bottles. It's the context.
Standing in a vineyard and seeing that one slope faces south and the other east, that the soil on one side is stony and the other clay, and then tasting the two wines side by side — that connects something that no amount of reading does. You suddenly understand what people mean when they talk about site.
Similarly, seeing the actual scale of a small operation, the physical labour involved, and how narrow the margins are, changes how you think about what a bottle costs.
Neither of those requires you to know anything in advance. They just require you to turn up, ask honest questions, and be genuinely curious about somebody's work. Which is the same thing that makes any visit to anywhere worthwhile.