This is the weekly column
There is panic and turmoil in high dollar wines you and I do not buy.
This is not about big dollar wines we could buy—Caymus, Jordan, Daou. You can purchase them at higher-end grocery stores. The turmoil is with wines you only can buy from an allocation list or very high-end wine stores. Covid and an influx of wines competing at pompous price points upended everything.
A lot goes into wines in that rarified price category. Millions invested—in Napa vineyards, in famous winemakers, in famous architects for the winery and tasting rooms. All goes into the bottle price.
And then there is trophy wine branding. People buy such wines not just for silky tannins and layers of bing cherry, ripe raspberry, and blackcurrant backbone. People buy so they can say to themselves, and especially to others, they can buy the wine.
When a winery decides to play in that bedazzling arena, it must protect its brand. And that is when flop sweat starts dripping. Recent years have not been kind. Demand down. People pinching purses purchase product from lower shelves. Purveyors panicked when pricey vintages went unsold. Then—horror of horrors—they did the unthinkable. They discounted.
When you sell your wine for $750 a bottle, the play is “if you won’t pay this much, there is someone else who will, and when this sells, there aren’t any more.” But rarity and exclusiveness are evanescent qualities. When the first merchant decides to clear his shelf and sells the wine discounted to $500, the shift hits the fans. Why pay high when you can wait and buy low. People who can afford such luxuries figured this out long ago.
When a Calistoga high end winery discovered a shop was going out of business and offered their wine at clearance prices, the winery immediately sent a distributor to buy the entire inventory to protect the price point.
“The moment people feel the product is easy to get at a discounted price, all of a sudden the rarity has evaporated,” Dave Parker, CEO of rare-wine retailer Benchmark Wine Group in Napa, told Wine Spectator.
If you are like me, you are not going to buy a $750 bottle of wine even at $500. But it is nice to note that as wine over-supply and clearance pricing trickles down, we may be in line for some sweet deals.
Last round
An orangutan in the zoo has two books: The Bible and Darwin’s Origin Of Species. The orangutan is trying to figure out if he is his brother’s keeper—or his keeper’s brother. Wine time.
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High-priced wine 6-19-2024