Wine tasting ranks among the best corporate team-building events (no bias here). Our Captivate office in Toronto recently took a tour of some Niagara wineries. We learned a lot about the winemaking process at Lailey Vinyard, one of the smaller wineries near Niagara-on-the-Lake. Our tour was fairly unstructured, but some other wineries are doing some interesting things to attract corporate groups.

The Viansa Winery in Sonoma Valley not far from San Francisco (see photo above) has an interesting team-building program that involves corporate teams creating their own wine. For a minimum group of 12 or more (at $65 per guest) Viansa lets groups experience the creation of a new wine with their own custom-designed wine label. The goal of each team is to prepare the perfect blend using three component wines. After creating three trial blends, the team selects their "Master Blend." The wine, label and team spirit are then judged with prizes awarded to the winner in each category. Sounds like fun, so it’s no surprise that recent clients at Viansa include Google, Bank of America and Mercedes Benz.

If you work near a wine region and are organizing a corporate team event, find out what the local wineries have to offer. The combination of tasting wine, learning about winemaking and enjoying the vineyard setting will be sure to boost company morale in these shaky economic times.