I want to explain something about the wine business. In the movie Bottle Shock,
there's a moment when an English wine buyer touring the Napa Valley in
the 1970s offers to pay a winemaker for a tasting. The winemaker is
befuddled as to why anyone would offer to pay for a tasting. It's a
funny little moment, since at the time California wineries were
grateful for anyone who was willing to taste their wine. There's a nice
little montage where the wine buyer goes from winery to winery, leaving
a few dollars behind to pay for the tasting, and the grape farmers and
winemakers marvel at how ignorant he must be.
Since then, wine
tasting has become a huge business. There are wineries that exist
almost entirely as tasting rooms and gift shops.
One of the
interesting marketing phenomena of the wine
business is the advent of tasting-room-only wines. That is, wines that
are exclusively for sale in the tasting rooms. Almost every winery has
them, and they're a
brilliant little bit of flim-flam.
Consider retail wine: Let's pretend there's a bottle that sells for $10. The winery
gets maybe $4 of that. (I'm making these numbers up.) The winery could,
theoretically, sell the same wine for $8 in its tasting room -- a 20%
discount -- and still make more money than it did on distributor sales
because there aren't middlemen getting a piece of the action. In the
early days, wineries sold just like that, which pissed off the
distributors who were being undercut.
Pissing off your distribution isn't smart in any business, but it may
be particularly stupid in the wine business, in which there are dozens
of regional distributors who are more or less used to being treated as
demigods. So, to protect those relationships, wineries make it a policy
to keep prices i ntheir tasting rooms at or slightly above retail.
Which
sucks for the winery since, once consumers figured out they could buy
the same wines back home for less, consumers stopped buying wine in the
tasting rooms. After all, why would you bother to schlep heavy wine
through airports when you could buy the same stuff back home, probably
for less?
At some point, some crafty marketer figured out that the thing to do
was create special wines for sale at the winery alone. So wineries
started making smaller production wines of somewhat higher quality. By
putting a
little more effort into tending a particular vineyard block, letting
the
grapes hang a little longer and extracting a little additional color
out of the skins, they could produce a "reserve" wine with the kind of
fresh, bold, New World fruit that turns critics' heads. That, in turn,
would boost the status of the winery within the wine business, making
their retail offerings more attractive to people out in the
hinterlands. It would also provide unique product for the tasting
rooms, creating an imperative for visitors to buy ("It's now or
never!") and allowing the wineries to charge whatever they wanted,
without regard for what the bulk buyers like Liquor Barn charge on
their discount shelves.
Everyplace you go, the hosts point out "this is only available in the tasting
room" and it is, inevitably, at a $70 price point. Give or take a few
bucks, that seems to be the magic number in Napa tasting rooms. Big,
fruity-fresh recent vintage...one day only...$70.
Let me tell you this: It works. I'm ashamed to say how well it works.
I'm not even a big, fruity-fresh Napa cab guy (though I am, in my own
way, fruity fresh) and I bought like I was on some kind of special
edition of Supermarket Sweep. And everyone around me was doing exactly
the same thing, buying bottles and gift packs and cases of wine at two
or three times their at-home upper price limit because it was special.
Bastards.
In Which We Pull a Comment From a Previous Entry to Perfectly Illustrate the Leninist Tendencies of Today's Conservatives
Fish:
And the ruin of a lot of innocent bystandars is a small price to pay!
Vive la Revolucion!
Longer explanation of title here.
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