Couldn't Believe My Eyes

Some crazy, funny and outright maddening things happen between ordering wine from the distributor and when it arrives. There’s always little stuff like the wrong wine showing up; half or twice what you ordered; the stack of wine on the delivery person’s hand cart falls over in the parking lot and even having your order delivered to the wrong establishment, accepted and signed for so illegibly you can’t figure out where it went, but they want the money.

A short while ago, we ordered the last case of an older cab. The distributor of the wine doesn’t use refrigerated trucks. Outside temp at 3 PM 98 degrees. Wine shows up about 5 pm. The capsules are all pushed up by the corks. It’s suggested we push them back down rather than the distributor having to come pick up the wine.

Today, we get four cases of wine delivered, sign for it and the driver leaves. Get to the bottom case and see it’s a re-pack. Open it up and pull out a bottle and there’s a price tag on it. I check the others and they all have price tags. How does that happen???

LOL.

Love the ‘push them back down’ comment.

That’s what I said to Lindsay Lohan.

Piss poor service.

If the repack was the wine you ordered, then I don’t know what you’re complaining about. It’s the repacks of (Insert name of expensive wine) which contain Sutter Home Moscato that worry me.

It sucks, it’s a PITA, but one thing I learned to practice thoroughly very early on is to check every single case on every single order every time. Don’t eyeball stuff from afar. Open every repack before you sign. Open up cases that are warm to the touch or that come on days when it’s below 25 degrees to check for cork push. They work for you. Tell the delivery guy to STFU and wait if you are helping a customer. They will. It’s not your problem if he’s in a hurry.

I think I know what Randy’s complaining about. If there are price tags on the bottles then that means the wine was originally shipped to another retailer, who: a.) may have stored it properly or may have left it sitting in the sun; and b.) decided that he didn’t want the wine any more and returned it to the wholesaler. You’ll never know why he returned the wine, but there probably was a pretty good reason. In any case, there’s nothing good that can come from this scenario.

Richard,

It would be a case-by-case decision based on the wine for me. I’m not too worried about a repack of Cavit PG with price tags on them as long as the bottles look normal. Something else, it might be different. However if you’re going to be that anal then you should just always refuse all repacks and get fresh unbroken cases. Wholesalers can’t always accommodate that request, you might miss out on some wines, but I guess if it gives you peace of mind…

Brent,
The case was taped closed with the same type of tape just like many cases that are delivered. It was a mid priced wine but with it being taped we had no reason to open and inspect every bottle. After moving the box we noticed a tag from a grocery store on the back side of the box “Return”. Possibly a wrong delivery and they realized it was not their product after pricing it. Had I seen that I would have checked the bottles and refused it when I saw the bottles with tags. In CA a retailer can return wine within 14 days of delivery, I don’t know if this had been sitting around in a hot storeroom for most of that time before being picked up.
If we receive a repack where the box is open I always inspect the bottles, especially if it comes from one of the bigger distributors, usually if it’s one of the small brokers/distributors there is much more care with delivery.

Carrie-is it possible for you to reach out to the grocery store that had the wine at some point? I would think it is a pretty small community and no one would want cooked wine to come back to them.

-paul

Due to the insane laws regarding the three tier system the distributors have no incentive to offer any type of customer service…

at a distributor i used to work for we had the same issue appear year after year. once the GD noveau was released we would ship it out, yet we would get many cases returned the following week. yep, you guessed it, the previous years beaujolais noveau in the current years box, with the boxes all sealed up. wasn’t my brand so wasn’t my headache, but i’m not sure why the brand manager never caught on…

Brent, here in Texas, the 2 major wholesalers pull wine orders from their warehouses at night, removing them from cold storage to reefer trucks with the reefers turned off even though overnight temps could be as high as 90 degrees. They turn on the truck reefers only at beginning of delivery run. They tend to deliver orders to grocery stores first since they’re usually open 24 hours, and it’ll sometimes take 2-3 hours or longer to negotiate the the grocery store delivery with the wine sitting out in ambient temp the whole time, and usually with the truck’s reefer turned off again. By the time the truck gets to us, somewhere between 9:30 am and 5 pm, that wine may have been exposed to 90-105 dgree temps for as long as 12 hours. If someone gets reshipped a wine that’s been rejected or returned by a grocery store, double those minimum exposures. That’s why no-one wants a grocery store reject. Unless they don’t mind selling an almost-guaranteed compromised wine. Our only saving grace is that every delivery attempt involves an almost impossible to remove shipping label from the wholesaler, so it’s pretty easy to tell that a box has been shipped, reshipped and re-re-shipped as many as five or six times in some cases. Automatic refusal, at our store. I’ve got an instant-read electronic thermometer that gets a LOT of use on a daily basis.