I am all for supporting small town business. However, my family and I (approximately 10 of us) unfortunately did not have a pleasant experience at Buffalo Rock Winery.
I was in Buffalo from Canada to attend a wedding. My extended family from across North America was there as well. We had called and reserved a spot with BRW to fill some time between the wedding and the reception.
Some of the older family members (including my mother who is 65) forgot to bring an ID. In hindsight, this is something obvious, but we are not from Minnesota, and we never dreamed that the age of the senior citizens of the group would be a problem. Apparantly, Minnesota has extremely particular and stringent ID laws that contain additional information over and above normal IDs. My family was not aware of that. One would think, being a tourist attraction, BRW wouldn't assume that everyone who walks on their premises is aware that Minnesota ID laws are exceedingly strict and particular. At the very least, a heads up when we called to book our group of 10 would have been appreciated.
Not so. The proprietor became very rude when she realized that (the senior citizens of the group) didn't have ID. We were sternly lectured and put in our place. She wouldn't allow nearly half of our group to participate or even stand anywhere near the younger crew who is accustomed to travelling with ID's.
I totally understand that laws are laws. It was just handled in a very poor manner, and could have easily been avoided.
To top it off, while half of us were working through our wine tasting, two (incredibly wet and muddy) stray labs came bounding in from some nearby water and were excitedly jumping and sniffing and running around our group. We had all come from a wedding, were dressed up, and didn't much feel like being investigated by stray dogs. None of the employees seemed bothered at all that the dogs would not go away and were clearly bothering us.
In short, I really never give bad reviews, but this was a bad experience. Hopefully it was just a bad day for BRW, I would hope they don't treat all their customers like that.