Earlier this week, I wrote a post about three wineries that all handled a missing or delayed wine shipment in different ways. (See Good, Bad, and Ugly ways to handle the same problem.) Since then, Heitz Cellars has made a bit of recovery.

Heitz Cellars was my "ugly" example in the post because I had called three times to check the status of some missing wine and they had short shipped my order twice. Yesterday, the last two missing bottles finally arrived. The modest recovery came from the refund they issued to my credit card. This means the end result was I finally had my delicious wine ('07 Zinfandel) and I didn't have to pay for it. Heitz Cellars makes some terrific wine and this gesture was enough to keep me as a customer.

This also serves as another installment in my collection of stories that prove the longer you take to solve a customer service problem, the more expensive recovery will be.

Related posts on expensive service recovery:

• The rising cost of recovery at the Sir Francis Drake
• Cox vs. Brinks: The cost of incompetence
• Avis service recovery