“ADAM” by Sabelli-Frisch
Yes, but what should it be? Pinotage? Or a 17% Cabernet from Clarksburg aged in 200% Bourbon barrels?
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Apple brandy barrels of course.
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Seems to me it’s been a decades long ratcheting up of wine prices and fruit prices. Sometimes one drives the other, sometimes vice versa, sometimes it’s just wineries seeing what their neighbors and competitors are doing, telling themselves “we need to charge the same, or more”. It’s a never ending spiral - upward, and it was frankly bound to come to this. If Napa (in particular) is going to survive, there will have to be a spiral down at some point, probably driven by producers going out of business, vineyards having to drop prices to sell, etc. What seems to be the case right now is that most of them haven’t come to that realization, and are just trying to hang on where they are in hopes that the wine economy will return to its glory days. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Plus now you have the added impacts of tariffs, a drop in tourism, probably recession for who knows how long. It’s not looking good for consumer spending on non-necessities.
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Love what Bedrock has done but they are not really a Napa winery.
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I share this same opinion but it has to come with a very humble and honest message to the consumer. Transparency is critical here.
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Do the grape growers of these wines get the same price as your wines? I think not. Lots more margin there means lots more advertising and marketing budget means more shelves and more sales.
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I read some stuff about incoming container ships being off by more than during the height of covid, so if those data are true it’s about to get ugly(ier).
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Cold day.
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Rivers-Marie (who I also buy from) also offers wide range of prices for their wines (from $40 to maybe $185ish).
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There low end Napa Cab went from $60 to $95 just like some of the others………
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“Here is the problem. You try a wine at retail. You like the wine and decide you’d like to buy a case of it every year. If you can buy it direct from winery every year for less the retail outlet just lost a customer they created. If you under cut the channel that creates demand from you far beyond your tasting room why would they want to do business with you?”
Exactly. I had a high-end wine shop for 23 years and will never forget the day a customer came in, picked up a bottle of a Napa Chardonnay I carried on a regular basis and accused me of price gouging, saying she had just visited the winery where it was $5 less per bottle. I called the winery and without identifying myself asked the price of the wine. My customer was right - it was $5 less than the suggested retail price. I lowered my price, sold out of my remaining inventory and never carried the wine again. They made me look bad in front of a regular customer. I never saw that customer again and always wondered/worried that she might have bad-mouthed my store to her friends.
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This seems strange to me. As a wine buyer I would expect Retail price > Wholesale/distributor price > Winery price. It seems to me that there’s a reasonable level of profit that each should make. I would expect the price in a retail store to be higher in order to cover the costs of renting the store, hiring staff, etc. On occasion I would be happy to pay a premium for the convenience of a local store, and for the variety of choice available there.
Here in Hong Kong I don’t have wineries to go to, but I do have a large number of warehouse/online suppliers, and that’s where I buy from 98% of the time because the costs of renting retail space in HK must inevitably jack up the price. Yet the supermarkets carry lots of wine and, presumably, sell enough for that to make sense. Specialist wine shops also exist. They each serve different market segments.
If the winery charged me the same price for a bottle on-site as a shop in a prime downtown space did then I’d be accusing the winery of gouging!
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Whoa!! Their Cab. or State Lane Cuvee? Are those coming-in under 14% abv these days?
They had State Lane, Roberta’s Reserve Merlot and the Rapzodia Cab Franc. I got a bit of all of them including a mag or 2015 State Lane for $290 I believe the release price for the 75s were $385….
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A reminder that if you type “$50 in 1996 worth today” into Google the result is “$50 in 1996 is worth $101.91 today”
And an even stronger reminder that if you’d simply put $100 in an S&P500 tracker on 1 Jan 1996 you would have had $1633.85 at the end of 2024.
Buying wine as an investment is for fools.
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