Our wedding experience can be summed up by one word: incompetence.
We were having our wedding in late October. They typically have weddings at 6:00 after the winery is closed. With our wedding being in late October the sun sets at 6. They changed the time to 5:00 and would close the winery early for us. At least that is what we were originally told. A week before our wedding they were asking if we could change our time to 6:00. Remember this is 2 weeks before the wedding, invitations had been sent out months ago. Coordination with all the venders had been finalized, there is no way we could move our wedding to 6, plus it would mean we would be getting married in the dark. The owner would never clarify that the venue would be closed to the public even after we showed him proof this is what we were guaranteed by Mount Pleasant.
There was a wedding at the venue before ours. I was promised that everyone would be out of the way so we could do pictures before hand and have everything set up. The grooms family was helping with setting everything up while the wedding party was off taking pictures. Luckily my mother in law was there making sure everything was getting done. She had to kick the previous wedding party out of the ceremony space because they were still taking pictures while everything was being set up. The chairs were still a mess from people leaving, not in nice lines as they should be. I was told there was not a Mount Pleasant person on site! The DJ comes to set up and asked my Mother in Law where he needs to go. Where is the coordinator?!?! I was promised they would organize things!
When we arrived at Mount Pleasant, at approx. 4:00, there were a ton of people at Mount Pleasant. I've never seen this many people here before and I've been here many times during beautiful weekends to talk about our wedding with different venders. There was a live band blaring music until 4:45, 15 min before our wedding. 5:00 our wedding is starting. There are crowds of drunk people walking by our area. People yelling and screaming when they see me. There was no Mount Pleasant worker there stopping this from happening. My bridesmaids are the ones that went over to them to ask them to be quiet. A dog runs through the ceremony space. People in lawn chairs that were watching the concert are visible in the backdrop. The drunken screaming continued throughout our ceremony, it is captured loud and clear by our videographer.
Reception:
When cocktail hour started the venue was not prepared. Our guests stood around waiting for them to find the key to the liquor cabinet. We had paid for a bar on the back deck that was supposed to be a full bar, but was only wine. Halfway through the reception we realized the premium beers we purchased were not being served. They had to check our contract before they would even get them out for us. Now this is a couple of hours after the reception has started. They would check our contract carefully when we told them something was wrong. Why didn't they do this while setting everything up? We have the wedding coordinator and trainee following us around asking what times we wanted things done. This had already been finalized with the owner that we had been speaking with for the past 2 weeks before the wedding. Not sure what happened with the communication between them. We kept telling them the DJ knows what is going on, so please talk to him, so we could continue to have fun and not be bothered every time. But they would always come up to me for questions on when I would like to do things.
We later found out, they never opened the additional parking that they have for special events. This parking was closer and would be less walking for the older ones who were there. Instead, our guests had to walk across the whole venue to get to our reception and also fight for parking spots with the crowd there to see the concert.
In the end, Mount Pleasant is a beautiful location, but they did not follow their contract that they had with us. The owner chose to keep the venue open for the concert instead of honoring Mount Pleasant's guarantee that the venue would be closed to the public. The wedding coordinator is supposed to make sure everything goes smoothly and not constantly nag the bride and groom during the event. It was not as relaxing as we hoped for, hopefully the guests still had a good time while we were busy answering questions for the 5th time. I called the owner to explain the numerous problems we had during our wedding - he took a list of the problems and claimed he would call me back after talking with his staff. He never called back and we never got so much as an apology. The problems with this venue start at the top and go all the way to the bottom.