I feel badly but I need to cut back firstly because my cellar is 2/3rds full and I need to reduce the pace in which I fill it, and secondly because of the same reasons the economy may go (or has already gone) into the tank are also weighing on me. My primary objective has to be to make sure I can support my family. So I’ve already decided to continue supporting the handful of wineries that I feel the most connected to personally, but I doubt I would purchase much from others at this time.
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No, your cellar is one-third empty.
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You have way too much room - filler up!
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This should really have been called an “open letter”.
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He showed his cabernet in Napa?
No he did not show it. I brought a few bottles to give to winemakers for gifts. I opened one and it showed beautifully.
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Thank you for the thoughtful message and continued dedication to the community. It’s appreciated!
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We really are due.
I am going to have to align with you here. Not making critical remarks about a piece of the business that can make up a substantial portion of a purchase price seems to be infantilizing business owners. Running a small business is difficult enough, running a small winery is even more challenging no doubt, but asking everyone to “be nice” in the face of adversity is doing a disservice to producers who need honest feedback, especially in the face of declining sales. If a producers owner or winemakers skin is so thin they can’t handle criticism on a wine forum over shipping then maybe the business is not longer a fit for them. I am in agreement it should be done in a constructive way, but many of us are pinching pennys as well and trying make the dollars work for a hobby we all love.
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I think the degree to what you are speaking of here sounds worse than what I was hearing back in the fall.
Were hotels still priced really high? I kept hearing that, and that can’t be good for tourism.
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Speaking strictly about shipping costs:
I have sympathy for producers who charge shipping and handling at or under cost.
I have sympathy for producers who don’t put their wines in obscene, over-sized, over weight glass.
I have sympathy for producers who offer the option of foregoing OWC.
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I think the producers don’t need people on here to “be nice”. They need people to buy wine. And if people aren’t because they think the shipping costs are too high, I imagine they would like to know that too. I know what it costs to ship wine, and it doesn’t cost $150 to ship a case across the US. If someone is charging that then they are making money on shipping.
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I’m afraid this takes us in to political, but there are two fundamental problems here:
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Young people don’t drink wine (or any type of alcohol) as much as they used to
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The USA does not have a cost base that enables it to make wine that is globally competitive for price. By world standards, drinkable American wine is VASTLY over-priced for what it is.
So, as your dear leader has divined, the answer is for all foreign (cheap, good) wine to be subject to large tariffs so that your domestic wine can stay competitive. Sadly though, this will just exacerbate problem number 1 and not actually solve the problem.
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Who is charging $150 for a case with ground shipping? This seems like hyperbole.
There are no easy answers and sadly there will be some major casualties. Wine is too expensive and wine from Napa is majorly so. 20 years of playing the “ only if you can pay the premium to even taste our wines” card, now it’s a call for sympathy? After banking on the cashe of the luxury scene and pricing for the exclusive? I feel the employees and farmers but the high end California wine market has seemed like a major bubble for sometime now and the crash will be brutal with loads of collateral damage.
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I do think I remember one of the recent releases where someone was saying that a case was in that neighborhood - can’t remember which specific one.
Cheers
It’s not. I don’t necessarily want to call out producers by name here, but it’s a producer that’s very popular on this forum.
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For ground?
But in any event it’s an extreme outlier.
Yes, for ground.
There’s a lot of high shipping charges lately. I recently paid $67 to ship 2 bottles from whwc via ground and will mostly be taking my business elsewhere.
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When they charge $60 shipping for 3 bottles and don’t offer to consolidate orders over the course of multiple releases. You do the math……
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