Caution – WineChateau.com in NJ

With regret, I think my fellow wine geeks should have fair warning from my experience if they are counting on this wine retailer. I’ll keep this as simple as possible:

1. I ordered and paid for a case of red burgundy from Wine Chateau (Metuchen NJ / Piscataway NJ - WineChateau.com) in August 2013. A fair price for the 2010 Jadot NSG Les Boudets – a nice single vineyard I wanted to have a case of to age, but not exactly rare. Delivery to my off-site storage delayed until the weather cooled.

2. I arranged delivery in November or early December.

3. My off-site storage facility contacted me to say they caught a discrepancy between the invoice in the box and what was in the case they received. No les Boudots, but only a case of the regular Jadot NSG . The facility charged be a fee for having to inventory and return the case, but thank God they caught the error.

4. At first, Wine Chateau agreed to fix the problem. Faith restored – an honest, unintentional mistake.

5. Then the retailer just refunded what I paid six months earlier - by email.

6. When I called, they told me that they could not get what I ordered. OK – stuff happens, but I objected because now the price of the wine elsewhere had shot up well above what I could have gotten it for back in August and I could only now find it for $20 plus per bottle more than I paid. Plus – I was down the fee from the storage facility.

7. The manager then agreed to a replacement of similar quality at cost: “Unfortunately we cannot sell below the cost but rest assured over the time we will adjust it however. You will never be in loss!”

8. Faith restored.

9. Since then, I’ve now been back and forth with Wine Chateau a half dozen times wasting my time proposing wines listed on their website that they could get me at cost to make up for the opportunity I lost, the fee I was charged and the now seemingly endless aggravation.

10. The responses have been either “at cost” pricing as high as retail cost elsewhere or - and this was the majority of wines I proposed - I got the response: “I apologize for that. None of the other wines are available as I myself checked with our supplier.”

11. “Uh, but they are all on your website right now,” met with no response.

12. Finally, still naively thinking that the guy actually wanted to fix the problem, I suggested that he name some equivalent red burgs that were available and the promised “at cost” pricing.

13. The belated response? Crappy pricing on entry level burgs.

14. Their response to my pointing that out, the fee, the time wasted…?: “You have already being issued refund on Jan 21 for the full amount you paid. So we owe you nothing.”

Frankly, I’ve just never had a retailer just yank me along like this. The funny thing is that people on this board sometimes crank on Premier Cru for sometimes not coming through, but I have to say they are the model of how to treat the customer in such instances. The few instances when they have not been able to deliver, they have always made amends and then some.

Anyway, fair warning that these guys are unreliable in my book. Life’s too short …

I think I remember this name before as being one of those “wholesaler lists” businesses, which almost never seem to provide good customer outcomes unless you want mass-marketed wines. Thanks for relating your tale of woe.

Sorry to hear about your headache. IIRC, I attempted three orders there over the last 2-3 years. On two of the three orders I placed, it subsequently turned out that the wines listed on the website weren’t actually available. Communication related to those orders wasn’t stellar, either. I don’t intend to order again.

These are the clowns who did the same thing to Peter Hirsch a while back. (The long “La Tush” debate thread on ebob was typical.)

I don’t know the first thing about this particular retailer.

But in the last few years, I have noticed an explosion in “aggregator” listings at Wine-Searcher.

Where an “aggregator” is a retailer who essentially just copies and pastes its state’s distributors’ line cards straight into its retail Wine-Searcher uploads, and then hopes to survive on a 0-inventory just-in-time “drop-ship” business model.

Increasingly, it seems to be the way of the world.

Anyway, the moment it dawns on me that I might be dealing with an “aggregator”, rather than with a true mom-and-pop bricks-and-mortar, I’m gone.

I had a bad experience with them a few years ago. I ordered a wine that soon after got a high WS rating and all of a sudden had a jacked up price on their website and suddenly was “out of stock” and never shipped to me.

Drew, you should have searched here before buying from them. They’ve been notorious for years.

Now you tell me, Ken!! What happened with you?

There are, or used to be, several retailers like this one (seemingly all or mostly in New Jersey?). I think their model is that they list a ton of wines they don’t have or at strikingly low prices, in order to induce you to place an order. Once you have done so, they use the fact that they have your attention to try to bait-and-switch you into lesser wines and vintages at worse pricing that they actually do have.

“I see you ordered the 2009 Bordeaux for $29.99. We’re all out of that and can’t get any more. We do, however, have the 2007 available for $34.99, can we just substitute that in for you?”

It’s pretty awful. Wine-Searcher should delist those stores, if they haven’t already.

I am wondering two things:

1. It would seem to be useful for each of us to list in this thread or a new thread those retailers we have encountered that are “aggregators” and simply list wholesalers’ lists on their websites for wines that they do not stock. Might be a helpful database to have so that everyone can avoid getting sucked into their web when they turn up on wine-searcher.

2. Is there any recourse in regard to Wine-Searcher…that is, would Wine-Searcher continue to list these retailers if they knew that their listed wines were simply wholesalers’ lists and not actually wines in stock or allocated pre-arrival bottles? If not, is there any mechanism for reporting this to Wine-Searcher?

I hope you complained to Wine-Searcher via their feedback page. I know personally that they will delist a retailer that continually screws over customers.

There were a bunch of these in NYS including several near me that I knew to be local places which did not have a single unusual wine in stock.

I never had this problem because I knew how to use the search function.

Oddly enough, my first wife’s parents lived about a mile from this place, so I shopped there frequently long ago and knew it was a small place. When they suddenly showed such inventory, I was suspicious.

Here’s a simple test if you find a place like this and are suspicious:

FWIW I went to look up the numbers for Wine Chateau and it appears they are no longer listed on Wine Searcher. Same for Wine Hunter which is the subject of my first link above. So Wine Searcher is paying attention.

Just to clarify, their original store was on Rt. 18 in East Brunswick, which is the store I was referring to above. I guess they don’t own that one any more.

Unfortunatley, they are still on wine searcher.

http://www.wine-searcher.com/merchant/5812?wine_id_F=948138&from_page_F=WSL

Sad.

Note from the listing:

• 29870 listings now showing for this retailer.
• Products may not be in stock but can be sourced; fulfilment may take longer.

So, they list well more than 10 times the number of wines that are listed by Wine Library.

I know Route 18 very, very, very well. There are two quality pizza places and zero quality wine shops.

It was in a little strip mall on the left going east just after the cut-off for Old Bridge Turnpike.

There was a good pizza place a little further down on the right in a stand-alone building just before Tice’s Lane. I don’t think it is there any more.

I used to sell to this store. The overall quality of the wine selection was low. The owner of the store had no passion for wine. The Metuchen store did have a better selection.

I do remember good pizza on Rt. 18. The place next to Marketplace comes to mind.

I think their headquarters are now in Metuchen. Guess I am not surprised by the bad customer experience as I had a bad vendor experience with them last year. Went online and it appeared they stocked some really nice wines so I made an appointment with their wine buyer to introduce our wines to him (and confirmed twice via email and telephone). I drive 45 minutes in the pouring rain to get there and arrive a few minutes early for my 10 am appointment - impressive building, nice new store location (very large) with offices in the back. Cabernet section isn’t too full and I see my wines would fill a void. After browsing the shelves it was time for my appointment - receptionist tells me it is the wine buyer’s day off - WTF? I am not happy (understatement). I meet briefly with someone (who I believe was one of the owners - nice office at least). He takes phone calls, staff walk-in, etc. while I am meeting with him - basically really rude and he knows that I had an appointment with his buyer and the guy didn’t show). Before leaving he says I can leave the wines and they MIGHT get around to trying them. Really I don’t think so.

I feel better now that I’ve vented.