Peter Nobile Vinyards Complaint

On May 9, 2007, Peter Nobile Vineyards from Cape Coral, FL made a sales call to Crye-Leike Realtors downtown office. The sales pitch was realtors could purchase cases of Peter Nobile wine and have custom labels on the bottles with the realtor's name as advertising and gifts. My husband purchased three cases of wine and paid $556.80 for it by credit card on that day. They informed him that he would be able to create his label later and they would send him sample labels in the mail.

Several months went by and we had not heard from Nobile Vinyards. My husband called twice in the following months and left messages about where the wine was, if he should have received sample labels by then, etc. but was never contacted back. He called a third time in October and finally got a woman named Anette on the phone. My husband decided to cancel the order since 5 months had gone by and he'd received no contact or product. Anette said the only way they could do a refund was for us to call our credit card company and request to dispute the charges. So we called our credit card company (USAA) and the representative told us that they could not dispute charges after 60-90 days. So my husband called back and got a different woman on the phone. He told her that we would not be able to dispute the charges with the credit card company and that we would like a refund. She said she would "pass the message along to Peter" and have Peter call us back. We never heard from him.

My husband called 7 more times after that and left messages with no response (two times before November 29, 2007 then on November 29, December 5, December 31, January 2,2008). He finally got Anette on the phone on Wednesday, January 2, 2008 and asked again for a refund, but Anette said they did not issue refunds and that we would just have to take the wine. My husband got off the phone and told me what she said and I promptly called her back and told her that was unacceptable, that the entire process has been unacceptable and I expect the company to cut us a check. She said she would "pass the message along" and "check her charge-backs" to see if she'd in fact returned our money. I assured her she had not charged our money back, but it sent up a mental red flag to me because I realized she meant she was capable of doing refunds, but just wasn't doing one for us. I asked her exactly when I should hear back and she said by the end of the week (Friday).

I did not hear from Anette on Friday, so I called at 5:00 that afternoon. She said that Peter said we'd "Just have to take the wine" but I told her that wasn't going to work. I told her my husband has since left the company and we would not 1) purchase that much wine at that price for us to personally consume and 2) be able to personally consume that much wine anyway. She told me that Peter guarantees his wine...but I told her that was irrelevant at this point and we just wanted a refund. She offered to hold half our wine for us so we could consume half of it and they would send the other half later, but I told her that it was totally asinine of her to think that I would trust the company to hold half the wine for me when the problem is that we never got the wine to begin with! Did she really think I wanted her to hold it?! Isn't that what they had been doing? She kept asserting that she didn't know why we didn't receive the wine, etc. and that she thought it was strange that she hadn't heard back from me until late that day, but I told her it was because I had been waiting for her to call me all day! She apologized and said she must have forgotten or miscommunicated that she would call, but I said all of that was irrelevant. I asked her if the company was a scam and she said that they were not. I asked to speak to Peter myself, but she said he was not in the office, but that she would, again, "pass the message along" and tell Peter to call me. I asked again when exactly I should expect to hear from him and she said on Monday.

I am expectantly awaiting his call tomorrow. Please help! We want our money back!

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