Are Wine Discounting Sites Recommended?

WINE TALK
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I have long felt that there’s a class of folk who use sites like Craigslist not so much to make a sale as to trick other folk into engaging in free garbage hauling [to remove all the unwanted crap from their property].

I wonder if at times there’s so much excess juice in the marketplace that warehouse space for the new vintage becomes more important than holding on to the old vintage, and maybe the importers & distributors will effectively give away their product for free, so long as the closeout specialists will agree to haul away the old vintages on the closeout specialists’ dime and on the closeout specialists’ insurance policies?

Meaning if the tractor trailer gets blown over in a windstorm, and tens of thousands of bottles are destroyed [we’ll hope & pray that the poor truck driver got out in one piece], then the contract was written so that entire mess is on the books of the closeout specialists, rather than the books of the importers or the distributors.

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Approximately 3 lbs, and a few ounces perhaps, but typically just over 3 lbs. Again, these are not wine discounting sites or “close-out specialists,” but major retailers shipping current releases of major wines from around the world. Again, these are not prices for 1 bottle, but rather for a case quantity, including a mixed case. 1 bottle is always going to be highest, then declining through a 12 bottle case (except for those few places which will ship an 18 bottle case). It should be expected that you can’t ship at anywhere near the prices they can, as I’m sure they are getting a major volume discount. At $1, I’m sure they are also eating some of the cost and I’m sure they also charge a bit more for mountain and west coast. Probably these are retailers where proximity to ports and favorable laws limiting distributor markups allow for lowest cost to their door.

43

Occam must be rolling in his tomb (were he a real person that is). Probably instead of conspiracies involving illegal immigrants, mistreated workers, and elaborate schemes to write off inventory, these are just businesses which have found a niche focusing on limited costs and attempting to make up profit on volume. Many fail and go away, some last.

I feel like by repeatedly saying “close out specialists” you’re insulting the posters who have participated here, suggesting they have poor taste and are buying plonk, even though it’s been repeatedly explained that one can also most widely available wines with little to no shipping cost from any number of sources. I also find your incredulity less than authentic since flash sites and retailers who subsidize shipping have been around for years and years.

1 Like
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What makes you think William of Occam wasn’t a real person?

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My recollection was that there was a debate as to whether the idea should really be attributed to him, but it was several years ago that I looked into it, and just for kicks rather than with any particular depth or purpose. Upon looking at it just now, it appears that he is rightfully associated with the principle, at least per a quick look at Wikipedia.

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At a high level, I’d say wine is close to a perfect industry for discount / flash sale retail. It’s 1) extremely fragmented 2) quality is very subjective, and while there is some correlation to price it is far from perfect 3) quality is only one component of successful sales, and arguably pales in comparison to marketing / distribution strategy and skill for many wineries (assuming some minimum threshold of quality) and 4) related to 1-3, tons of operations that make good wine but may not be great at sales/marketing, or predicting demand and invenotry management…or just have occasional bottlings out of the many they do each year that don’t sell out for reasons unrelated to quality. On top of all this, given the fragmentation there is a steady stream of wineries changing hands or shutting down, leading to inventory clearing, again for reasons largely unrelated to the quality of the inventory.

Adding these together all but guarantees a consistent supply of high quality wine that for one reason or another will not be able to sell out anywhere near a “comparable” normal retail price. Of course the discount sites tend to add a lot of filler in between higher quality offerings, hence the need as others have mentioned to develop your own process for evaluating / researching deals.

47

Literally, every offer from WTSO includes free shipping with a set number of bottles-rarely more than four, sometimes as low as one. The number goes up (generally) as the price goes down. LastBottle does the same. FirstBottle has a similar policy–generally either a dollar amount or a number of bottles. They bought Invino a while back, and the policy there is free shipping with six bottles or $150 (I think) spent. WineAccess has free shipping with six bottles or $120 spent (and increases the discount on the wine as the number ordered goes towards a solid case). Garagiste used to be unpredictable and a bit expensive on shipping, but is now about $2.50 per bottle; that is offset by not adding sales tax. (Not sure if they pay it from the list price, or if they can claim no brick/mortar presence and not collect it). I can probably tell you a few others, but I do pickup at JJBuckley and occasionally RWCo, since I live nearby their warehouses, so I haven’t got those memorized, and anything else like WineX, LAWC, etc would be before the pandemic, I think. The Wine.com option for shipping is like Amazon Prime, but Wine.com has noncompetitive prices to begin with, and who wants to pay up front for shipping?

See, I do have experience in “this market segment,” as well as in purchasing from retailers, wineries, and (once in a while) supermarkets and big box stores. (I wrote a big piece for another site, now defunct, on the online market, years ago.) Not sure who stole my trust fund, but I must have had one, I guess. Meanwhile, maybe look at how the internet has changed rackjobbing, and take a look at what happens when a new vintage shows up on the shelves and the distributor still has some of the old one in the warehouse.

Now, for the OP: Everything Greg Tatar says about wine is the gospel truth, until you start a blind tasting. [I am not being sarcastic–he’s an encyclopedia that just happens to be 6’5" tall or so.] And all of the sites have to be double checked because the “comparable” or “best web” prices are arrant nonsense (kind of like the quoted post above), and the hype about the wine is, well, hype. I wouldn’t start my wine journey on the flash sites, but I find some things with limited distribution through WTSO and LastBottle (esp reasonably priced Italian wines from the Langhe and Montalcino) on those sites; I see what critics I like said about them, or if friends posted notes on CT (sometimes the critic and the friend are the same person), and I’ve discovered some reliable faves that way–Cascina Luisin, Rivetto, Ghisolfi in the Langhe; Caparzo, Molino del Piano, Vitanza in Brunello, to name just a few. Buy locally to start unless your local wine sources are really bad, then keep buying locally and add in the flash and other sites as you start to know what you like and see them listed. Get into this hobby and you can keep a few businesses in the black before you know it.

48

According to CT, I have purchased 364 bottles from WTSO over the years. I’ve never had a bad experience. A lot of it was champagne. What I like about them is that there are labels that they carry all the time. You can call them to see if they have any even if it isn’t the current wine being offered. I’ve purchased a lot of my champagne from them that way.

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Nobody mentioned casemates.com. It’s a flash site (originally started as wine.woot.com) that has new offers 9pm PT on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday nights. The format is simple - there’s a full case option and a smaller option that could be anywhere from 2 to 6 bottles. The case option is (obviously) cheaper per bottle. If you’re not a member then shipping is $8 for the small pack and $12 for the case.

The thing that makes it unique is the accompanying forum (kind of like here in many ways) where folks can discuss each offer. For most of them, they send out a Lab Rat bottle to a few different people so they can taste and report back. The quality of those tasting notes can vary wildly. Often enough the winemaker will join in for some of the chat.

Mostly California wines, mostly smaller wineries. Sometimes we get Oregon or Washington there. Less frequently we’ll get Michigan or New York. They get imports from time to time, too.

I’m not a shill, I’ve just been using that site since roughly 2008 and most of what I’ve learned about wine came from discussions there. There’s also quite a number of people from here that are active there.

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I’ve gotten some great deals from Premier Cru! newhere pileon [berserker.gif] [bye.gif]