Three Sundays a Month, Five Times a Year, Fifteen Days of Fun
I look forward to our Club Sundays. In fact, they’re my favorite days to work. One summer, I missed all of the Club Sundays in June because I was traveling overseas, and I honestly felt like I’d missed all the fun (kind of took me back to my middle school days and that awful adolescent feeling when you just know you’d missed something exciting that everyone else got to experience). Club Sundays at 4.0 are “happening.” They’re where all the cool kids want to be.
Our regular Sunday staff is small (a skeleton crew), but on Club Sundays, it’s literally all hands on deck. We start the day by setting up every single table and chair on property. Every. Single. One. Pre-event center, this meant dragging tables and chairs out to a tent. Now, it means rolling them to every covered patio space available.
Anyone not on table and chair duty is responsible for swapping out wines in the pit and stocking every other bar we have. This means making sure that all of the bars have only that month’s wine club selection wines. No other wines are to be poured. This is our members’ chance to sample their shipment wines…and then buy more of them (at a great 30% discount!).
The only people not involved in tables, chairs, and wine are our “foodies.” While the rest of get the tasting rooms and patios ready, Jesse, Marie, and Donna are cooking. Usually, Jesse’s been at it for a while, days even. Whether the result is pulled pork, chili, chicken tortilla soup, brats, or gumbo, it’s yummy. And there’s always a veggie option for those of us “bad hunters.”
Things don’t always run as smoothly on Club Sundays as we would hope. Once we ran out of buns for the brats, and Jesse’s wife had to make a special (and very quick) delivery. Another time, our Internet went down, and we were forced to locate one of those old credit card swipers (which turned out to be useless because we didn’t have the slips to fit it). One rainy February Club Sunday, the tasting room was so crowded that we couldn’t even move across it to restock wines or refill food samples. That was when we decided to move to two Club Sundays per month…and now, of course, we’re at three per month.
But even when things get crazy (and they often do), I love the chance to catch up with members who I’ve come to know over time. It’s a time for me to hear about their recent travels and big events and life changes. It’s a time to swap funny stories, like the one members shared recently about the dog they adopted while at Mardi Gras. Or the one about a member who was caught in her “birthday suit” when a helicopter filled with sightseers flew over her house. Of course, we talk about our wines, but more than that, we talk about our lives.
Working a 4.0 Club Sunday reminds me of the TV show Cheers where everyone knows your name. Most of us who have worked at 4.0 for a while (and that’s a good many of us) know our long-time members by face, if not by name, so our Clubs Sundays have an “old home week” feel to them.
If you’re a 4.0 member and you haven’t yet joined us for a Club Sunday, be sure to check your availability for our next ones on June 2, 9, and 16, and make plans to be here for one of them. With our mix of great wine, tasty food, live music, and good-old-Texas hospitality, you won’t regret it!