On DuVine Adventures bike tours, we know how to feed our guests. Only the absolute best will suffice. But how will we know what is the best if we don’t sample it ourselves? Obviously, we can’t, and that’s why we make sure to treat ourselves every once in a while to some fine meals of our own. Quality control is tough business, but someone has to do it to ensure that you, our loyal guests, get nothing short of the full DuVine experience. And that is why, this past week, DuVine guide Angelo Scimia set up a delicious Spanish style picnic for us to enjoy. If you want a taste for yourself, just hop on a DuVine cycling tour in Spain.
Mottos are fun, tag-lines are catchy, mission statements are vital, and vision statements are in vogue. But to me, bike, eat, drink, sleep is none of these – it is my formula. It is an equation. It is a recipe. It is how I live my life and design my tours. After sixteen seasons of perfecting my formula, just like all great inventors, I must protect it.
A few years back I formally trademarked DuVine Adventures and Bike. Eat. Drink. Sleep. This is our recipe and we are the only company that will offer this style of travel to you. I call it the “DuVine Style.”
So what is DuVine Style? DuVine Style is scenic, safe, and exhilarating biking. Fresh, local, lovingly prepared food. Wine, blended with care, often harvested locally and included with every meal. DuVine Style is like a famous vintage, blended in equal parts with sophisticated and welcoming lodging.
Every day on a DuVine tour exudes this energy and perfect combination of ingredients. When visiting a new destination, developing a new itinerary, or referring a popular tour, these four components are my beacon. If even one component is missing, it doesn’t pass my test.
Travel is serious business. I take the fact that our guests spend valuable time and money with us seriously and I value their trust that we will deliver a quality tour. DuVine guides provide six consecutive days of service, which is made possible by our great local vendors, partners, and friends.
Additionally, I strive everyday to ensure we offer the best value in the industry. Smaller group sizes, the most exclusions (such as wine and road bikes), complimentary pre- and post-travel planning services, and more are all part of every DuVine Adventure.
I stand by our recipe and look forward to sharing it with you. Call me anytime to discuss your next DuVine bike tour.
Deborah, our Operations and Sales Manager back in the Boston office, recently made a trip down to Brazil to visit past DuViners, meet with guides, and see what Sao Paulo is all about. We have had a large amount of Brazilian guests on our bike tours around the world, which was the main reason we established an office there early this year. Deborah has provided us with great information on her experience in Brazil and it sounds amazing!
Brazilians are friendly and hospitable and my trip to Sao Paulo to visit the DuVine office in Brazil was all about hospitality. Guilherme and Marina welcomed me with open arms and it was wonderful to meet everyone and spend time training Barbara, Vanessa and Donatella. Like Boston, DuVine’s Brazil office is growing fast.
Dining in Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo is chic. It is a gigantic city of cement, but filled with culture, art, designer shops, well-dressed people and gourmet delights. With a population of 11 million in the city, sprawling out to 20 million in the surrounding area, it is vast yet filled with interesting diversity, from its mixed population of Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese and African cultures. With the third greatest concentration of buildings in the world (behind New York City and Hong Kong) the architecture ranges from skyscrapers to old colonial buildings like the Opera house in the old city, built as a copy of a European counterpart. Most are modern, such as Oscar Niemeyer’s Ibirapuera concert hall in the park where free outdoor concerts are regularly held, a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Art abounds from the Pinacoteca museum to the chic urban graffiti found at Beco do Batman and street graffiti, known as pichacao, is even to be seen on the top of skyscrapers – how does one get graffiti on top of high-rise? With 5 business centers interspersed with high-rise residential apartments the city towers for kilometers, as does the traffic, though small cars help the traffic to flow better. A tour is a great way to get around and my guide Eliana Souza was very knowledgeable.
Surprisingly, the first thing I saw driving from the airport into the city were cyclists on the freeway. It certainly indicated that this is a city where people like to bike. On Sundays, the inner lanes of the major roads are for cyclists only and are filled with everyone heading to the parks. It is easy to see why so many Brazilians join us on our ‘Bike, Eat Drink, Sleep’ DuVine tours. Food is important in Brazil and to Paulistanos in particular, going out for lunch is so civilized and much healthier for digestion. It provides a much needed break to both body and mind and rejuvenation for the remainder of the day. We ate at Le Jazz whose chef Chico Ferreira will host our October Chef on Wheels tour in Burgundy. The group will stop at the market to purchase local produce for the evening delights cooked, of course, by their very own traveling master chef. Both the duck and porc cutlets at Le Jazz are highly recommended. I also got to try Feijoada, a Brazilian cassoulet, at Figueira Rubaiyat, a well-known restaurant with a gorgeous setting built around the city’s oldest fig tree.
Wine Tasting in Brazil
In the DuVine style of eating and drinking, I was fortunate to meet many of our Brazilian guests at our Soiree held at the home of Guilherme’s parents, a gorgeous mansion filled with wonderful treasures. They were charming hosts, along with our DuVine staff. We had a scrumptious spread with local soups, bacalhau pies – a Portuguese cod fish dish, and wonderful cheeses. It was so nice to meet a number of past DuViners and to chat with many future friends. A wonderful evening was had by all, and Chef on Wheels was a hot topic during the night, along with our new Portuguese trip in the untouched Alentejo region, with its similar culture, easy cycling and great cuisine & wine.
Towards the end of the week, Marina and I visited Ribeirão Preto, in the interior of Sao Paulo state. The region is rich in sugar cane, and Marina assured me it is a gorgeous drive through the fertile farmland. In our case we got torrential rain. To make things a bit better, the people I met there were wonderful, exuding the Brazilian hospitality I was experiencing everywhere. We met a number of friendly agents there and were hosted to another wonderful Brazilian meal, based, as usual, around meat. We also spent a lovely evening with Gilberto, who’d just attended our Soiree and is to join us in Burgundy in October. We met friends in a local restaurant with live Brazilian music and were then hosted to a personalized tour of downtown, including a stop at the famous Pinguim beer bar, famous for its draft beer and now a symbol of the city. The beer was supposedly sent by pipe directly from the factory to the taps and is pulled over ice to ensure correctly chilled. It certainly tasted great. I can’t wait to reciprocate with DuVine hospitality in Burgundy.
Marina extended more Brazilian hospitality to me with a relaxing visit to her gorgeous beach house in Guaruja for my final weekend. While it was winter there it was still warmer than Boston and a gorgeous temperature for walking on the beach and sitting and drinking coconut water fresh from the fruit, followed by Caipirinha’s sold at small beach kiosks, Brazil’s national drink and a beach tradition. A wonderful ending to a busy DuVine week!
We hope everyone had a great time at the soiree and hope to see everyone again soon. Deborah had an amazing time in Brazil, but we are glad to have her back in Boston!
What an auspicious start to a new year it was, like a lot of companies, we had all hands on deck, ready to face the unknown. Everyone was talking about the financial meltdown. People were losing their jobs, stock portfolios had dropped by 50%, retirement was seen as a far off dream …. so who the heck wanted to travel … especially on a luxury bike tour to Europe or Africa or the Americas?
Trying to figure out what to do I had decided to look very carefully at our operational costs. What could we live without in the office? We had several meetings, and everyone needed to come to the meeting with how they thought they could save money. I did this because the last thing I wanted to do was cut jobs or reduce the quality of our tours. At DuVine what is important to me first and foremost are our travelers and our staff so we needed to remain strong and positive, despite what was going on around us.
January started off slow but once February hit the phones kept on ringing and it did not stop. We worked hard to speak with every potential customer, answering their questions, helping them with special needs and requests so that they would see the value in our product and company. We knew that we had to keep true to our goal of providing each person with the vacation of a life-time.
We were bolstered early on in the year with some National Prestige and Awards including:
Additionally, a very satisfying aspect of 2009, was being able to create jobs in the so called slumping economy. We added 5 great new hires in our main office during the first two quarters (Dede, Deborah, Neshelle, Michelle, Gina) and many new bike tour guides out on the road. I told guides in the beginning of the season, that I was not sure how big our bike tours would be each week, but if they stuck with us, they would be see the rewards at the end of the rainbow. In the end, most of the DuVine bike guides had their best season ever, with sold out tours, big tips and really fun exciting clients who loved the bike, eat, drink, sleep concept. I received tons of wonderful emails from 2009 travelers, who loved their trip with us.
Another highlight of 2009 was the introduction of a number of new bike tours – in particular; Mallorca, Puglia, Piedmont, and Mendoza. I was nervous putting out these new tours… thinking can we fill them? I traveled to each location, created each tour, met with the people and drank the wine… knowing that if we build it… they will come. All of these bike tour regions..Mallorca, Puglia, Piedmont, Mendoza beat our goals and had many satisfied travelers and are a big part of the plan for 2010
As is always fun, we introduced the DuVine Concept to many new travelers and were fortunate enough to be able to protect the travel plans of multiple travelers who were canceled from other companies’ tours due to their low load factors.
Many people traveled with DuVine, because the bigger bike tour operators only run tours with specific “load counts.” Being small and real, we are not just about the bottom line. The customer experience, our travelers vacation time is very important to us… we take that very seriously. Therefore we did not cancel trips, and kept dates open for sale, voila… good karma and not being greedy…they filled. It was good for everyone.
Another amazing thing in 2009 was the creativity of our team in building the first ever ‘hybrid’ brochure which showed our dedication to unique and personalized travel plans. Many people throw away their brochures, which doesn’t fit well with the concept of being green, so we thought, why not produce a marketing tool, in the form of a travel brochure that people can use? So we created our travel planner – which is a calendar, brochure and thank you gift all in one. Our staff did an amazing job from start to finish, making the DuVine travel planner a real winner. The emails I have received have been overwhelming.
With all the amazing growth in 2009, we still need to stay laser focused on being the unique and personalized tour operator that we are known for. Not the big shot, not the impersonal tour mill, but the great boutique shop or restaurant with a few tables that you know and love….where you know the chef, the waiters and people’s names. A company where you can show up wearing what you want and bike how you want…. just be ready to bike, eat, drink, and live the good life.
If a cycling tour of Bordeaux embodies DuVine’s original inspirational vision, a bicycle trip through Provence represents the essence our mission – to engage your senses, nurture your curiosity and pamper your tastes.
Provence – the name itself evokes images of lavender fields, olive trees, the aroma of rosemary and sage, tapanade, goat cheese, pastis, Muscat, the land of Cezanne and Van Gough, the world of Peter Mayle. Life at an easier pace.
May is a wonderful month to spend touring Provence on bike. The sun is out most days, the strong summer heat has yet to arrive, and the Mediterranean spirit fills the air with warmth and an unhurried pace. Slow down and let Provence soak into your soul and reverberate through all of your senses.
Bike through vestiges of ancient Roman settlements, medieval hilltop villages, and miles of lush green vineyards; Eat crispy hot toasts slathered with garlic aioli or an olive and anchovy tapenade; Drink at café to reenergize with a café au lait or a pastis, a traditional anise-flavored liqueur; Sleep at an oasis of peace and quiet, beautifully integrated into the natural splendour of its surroundings.
Engage, nurture and pamper yourself this May on a bicycle tour of Provence.
Our California bike tours are focused on Napa and Sonoma. With great weather, breathtaking scenery and over 500 vineyards, the wine valleys of Napa and Sonoma are a cyclist’s paradise. Leave the streets of San Francisco behind, head up along the rugged Sonoma Coast, inland through redwood forests, and down into these bountiful valleys to experience the world of wine country.
bike the rolling valleys, through vineyards or surrounding mountains…eat some of the best gourmet cuisine in the region… drink at world renown vineyards, private wine tastings, and initmate cellar samplings… sleep in some of the most luxurious and unique properties in the region…
This tour of California is guaranteed to please all – from those seeking family fun to super-fit pros. Come explore Napa and Sonoma the DuVine way.
With more than 14 years of European bike tour experience in delivering award-winning luxury vacations, and a network of proven leaders spread throughout Europe, DuVine Adventures has a guaranteed track record of providing seamless service from arrival to departure. DuVine Adventures is on hand every moment, ensuring that your journey proceeds smoothly, guided by professionals who know and love Europe.
With an average of 8 to 12 guests and a maximum of 16 passengers, DuVine Adventures groups are small enough to facilitate personal contact among group members, and undivided attention from your two tour guides. These smaller numbers also result in access to quaint restaurants off the beaten track, and discerning luxury hotels that refuse large groups. Ask about our private trips.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=cb86ba82-a0c0-4dea-9728-25b0f1cfcdf9)
