Wine Buying 101 - Philip Bernot

I think everybody is guilty of this little sin, or would like to be: you are in a store and you see an item that you just know is mis-priced. It should be twenty five dollars, but there it is at $10.99. You want to tell someone “I think the price is wrong here!” but hey, things are going up every day and it harder to make ends meet. You scoop up the item, all of it, and hope you don’t get busted before you get out of the store. The same is true for wine; only different. Two to three times a month I taste something that is wickedly under-priced to its value and I buy it with gusto. I tell the customers who want to hear it about the amazing value, but let’s be honest-not everyone wants to hear it. Some folks buy what they buy strictly on price. Many shoppers, and not just here, are deeply suspicious of items they think are “too cheap.” Three things happened today that made me want to write about this:

One: We have been selling a wonderful wine from Spain; so much in fact that it has become the top-selling wine in the store in the year 2008. I’m not surprised-from the moment I tried it I thought it was an obscenely good value. I just got word that the new vintage is slated for a price increase-up to 90%! Obviously this is more than currency fluctuation and transportation costs. To be honest the new price is really more in line with the quality, but we were happy to sell as much as we did when it was cheap.

Two: One of our customers who knows his Italian wine very well bought an interesting red wine from Southern Italy on our recommendation. The wine was being discounted by our wholesaler for one reason only-nobody there knew how to sell it. It is amazing wine and we are selling it for an even more amazing price. The customer and I came to the same conclusion-this is a fifty-plus dollar bottle of wine-at less than fifteen dollars!

Three: I tasted a line of premium California wines, of which the least expensive would set you back about thirty-five bucks; and it went up from there. The resume of the winemaker is one of very well-known, but commercial, wines. I wouldn’t give you thirty-five cents for all four that I tried.

If you want to know the names of the first two wines, stop by and see me. The last wines I don’t ever want to talk about again!