Napa Wine Train apologizes to book club

The Napa Valley Wine Train issued an apology Tuesday to a book club that includes mostly black women who said they were booted from a tasting tour because of their race.

The company also promised additional training for employees on cultural diversity and sensitivity, and offered the reading group free passes for 50 people for a future trip.

"The Napa Valley Wine Train was 100 percent wrong in its handling of this issue," CEO Anthony "Tony" Giaccio said in a statement. "We accept full responsibility for our failures and for the chain of events that led to this regrettable treatment of our guests."

The 11 members of the book club, all but one of whom is African American, said rude employees ordered them off the train on Saturday, mid-journey, and through six railroad cars before escorting them off the train, to their embarrassment, the women said. One member of the group is 83.

"We were insensitive when we asked you to depart our train by marching you down the aisle past all the other passengers," Giaccio said in his letter. "While that was the safest route for disembarking, it showed a lack of sensitivity on our part."

"You can apologize, but you can't take away the experience we had," Lisa Johnson, an Antioch, California author who has organized the group's outings to the Wine Country for the last 17 years, told the Oakland Tribune. "We were still marched down the aisle of the train car to waiting police officers. I'm still traumatized by the whole experience."

“I can’t see us going back on that train,” Johnson told the Tribune.

Wine train spokesman Sam Singer, a crisis communications specialist whom local news site SFGate.com reported was hired Monday, said employees had repeatedly asked the women to either quiet down or get off the train and accept a free bus ride back to their starting point.

Giaccio said he had a conversation with Johnson, a leader of the Sistahs on the Reading Edge Book Club, which has also been called Sisters on the Edge, and offered the group the free passes for a reserved car "where you can enjoy yourselves as loudly as you desire."

The Napa Valley Wine Train offers food and wine to passengers as they roll to Napa County wineries in updated Pullman cars.

On average, Singer said, individuals or groups are asked to get off the wine train once a month for various reasons.

Wine Train employees had called police in St. Helena about the book club members, who were already off the train when officers arrived.

Police spokeswoman Maria Gonzalez said it was the first time in memory that the Wine Train had sought such assistance from the department.

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press