How good or bad are you finding the service from couriers right now?

I think on the whole the couriers have been fairly decent. I get on well with the local guys but ones who are not familiar with the area can often be intimidating and stressful. That’s all probably down to them being under pressure. ‘Fragile and handle with care’ means absolutely nothing and you have to have extreme protection afforded to any packages. Our main courier is good on the phone and email so when things do go wrong we do have someone we can at least sort it with.

Alan Irvine
The Scottish Gantry, Milngavie & Stirling

We didn’t realise that the greatest bane of our lives would be sending things and it not arriving in one piece. We were so excited when we sent out our first order. We’d lovingly boxed it up and handed it over to the smiley collection guy and it was never seen again. That was our wake-up call. Every time a box goes out we cross ourselves like Catholics and just hope it’s going to make it. We changed couriers three times during our first year.”

Alex Griem (This month’s Gosset Champagne winner)
Chilled & Tannin, Cardiff

We had a situation yesterday where the courier had a breakage and for some reason they managed to return it to a private individual, who isn’t even a customer. So this 85-year-old lady received this breakage and it leaked all over her floor. It’s one thing to break the wine but to send the return to a completely random person – it’s just bizarre. Most of the time things are OK, but I think they are all under pressure and they don’t have enough staff.

Francis Peel
Whitebridge Wines, Stone, Staffordshire

We work with Parcelforce and they’ve been brilliant. There’s a members’ forum on the Vindies website and I think the consensus was that Parcelforce was the most reliable. We use the three-stage pulp packaging, you could almost drop it from 20 feet and the bottles would be fine. I think if you get the packaging right, you’re halfway there. We don’t label it with our company logo so it’s not blindingly obvious that it’s a box of booze.”

Simon Hill
The Artisan Wine & Spirits Co, Salisbury