Glass House Estate Winery

We got married in March and had our ceremony and reception in the conservatory, and the cocktail hour in the tasting room. Both spaces are gorgeous. The venue is excellent and the catering and bar services are fantastic. We had endless compliments about the beautiful space and abundant natural lighting, which was important to us for an indoor venue, as well as the food and wine. We were able to add quite a few personal touches that made it feel like us. We had 100 people attending, which felt like a good number and more might have felt a bit tight. Tricia was extremely helpful as a coordinator and was a pleasure to work with as we were dealing with some stressful life events that made it so we only had 4 months to plan a wedding. 

A few pieces of feedback that we'd share:

Having never booked a wedding before, we were surprised by some fees that we felt hadn't been covered in our many conversations/email threads about what to expect, so we would suggest that anyone booking with Glass House to be thorough in their questioning and to request a full breakdown of costs well in advance. For example, we were aware of paying for bartenders per hour, but not that the chef and event manager also had to be paid per hour. The extra fees added up to almost $2000 more than we'd expected, and while I'm sure they were industry standard fees, we were surprised by them at the last minute. These details could be added to the pricing package to help budget-conscious couples decide if it really does fit their budget. For the price we paid, we'd thought that more things were included in that rate.

The winery is managed as a restaurant/winery separately from the event/catering company (Blank Canvas) that deals with the weddings and events. There were a few major agreement-breaking changes that the winery management made to the space that Blank Canvas had no control of but then didn't pass along to us, which led to some breakdown in communication and things being different than what we had viewed and were told to expect. E.g. The addition of the permanent domes to the patio, and the 'permanent' promotional car parked in the prime outdoor photo space by the bridge that the winery manager said couldn't be moved, so we couldn't take large group photos in the outdoor space we paid for without having the red car in the shot. It does seem like the two managing parties are making efforts to improve those lines of communication so it is more seamless, so we're optimistic that it'll get better with time. For example, they recently made it so we could enter even earlier than we'd expected to set the room up on the day of the event, which was fantastic.

Overall we were thrilled with our day and are very happy that we chose Glass House for our wedding, especially since it was possible to do our day entirely indoors in the event of rain, which is a tough thing to find!