Looking to understand what is behind the Mystery Wine offerings from Garagiste. Assuming Jon can’t disclose the producer because the price is so low…but we all end up knowing the wine at some point regardless. How do the conversations work behind the scenes? What are the parameters Garagiste must follow? Do other retailers do this or is it just a Garagiste thing? How come the distributors don’t just offer these wines to a big box retailer like Costco?
Also I assume the mystery case is just odds and ends from leftover parcels. Please let me know otherwise.
Here is the concise explanation: you know how Jon barrages you with all sorts of flowery language to try to get you to buy his wine? Well, there are some wines that despite his hucksterism, they still can’t move. So, he has one of these mystery sales to make people intrigued, hoping that they will bite. Nothing more involved than that.
Rest assured, however, that even these wines come with the implicit Garagiste guarantee of fraud, bait and switch, and unfulfilled promises.
The first Mystery wines remain a mystery to this day. One thing they proved though, without a name label and high price, some wine is just not good.
The mystery wine concept has unfortunately spread to other on-line retailers, such as wine.com. I don’t think a local retailer would ever pull a stunt like that. It is a peculiar way of getting wine into the hands of people who probably will not like it.
Interesting that on an aussie forum, a similar discussion is debating cleanskins and mystery wines where a genuine (critic’s) tasting note is used to hint at what the wine is. Social media seems to be a factor (the e-coupon generation?).
This stuff bypasses me, and maybe we don’t even have it here. There was a retailer a while back who was selling genuine / label fully disclosed wines by the case / half case, clearly shifting bulk stock, but they stopped trading a while back. The stock was a mix of cheap tat, some stuff that was still overpriced, plus a few genuinely good price reductions and on a few occasions - on stuff that I liked.
But (a) the number who buy the wine from Garagiste is tiny compared to all the potential buyers for the wine at regular price and (b) there isn’t a likely a not more of it out there to be cleared out by the time it’s sold this way so this price won’t undercut sales of this particular wine.
Of course, if you saw that Clerico was blown at every year at $39.99, it would devalue the brand. But if it’s a one-time, one vintage deal, it probably doesn’t undercut the long-term pricing.
Winery A says they have 100 cases of wine that I need to move, either poor accounting, poor vintage, over valued wholesale price, ect.
They turn to their distributor (me) and say they will allow me to present it to Jon but it can’t have an advertised price (talked about above).
I represent the wine to Jon and don’t hear back… 3 weeks later I get an order for x cases of wine to be shipped that week.
The idea is that it is a true mystery until it shows up in the customers hands…
Many talk smack about Jon, but almost every winery stumbles along the way and needs someone to move volume of wine without devaluing what they have worked for.
+1 on what Todd said. I saw a distributor who no longer represented a winery and they got revenge by selling a high priced wine for less than half of current retail on it. That did some short term damage to the price people were willing to pay for the next vintage that came out at full price.
Unfortunately, as in most things, it seems to be both. On the one hand it makes perfect sense that a winery wants to protect its brand and $ perception while still moving some tough inventory that is good but not great (or any other reason), but with Garagiste it also seems too much like a bad car salesman pitch designed to offload crap. Both are probably true in different situations. I’ve never bought any of his Mystery wines, but I’ve seen people post about what they ended up being and not all of them were crap. my 2 cents.
To your point about “not all of them being crap”, that’s one of the pitfalls of “Mystery Wine” not always being something for the masses. It gets used to pimp wines that otherwise would be a hard wine sell since the deal isn’t that sexy.
I hear what so many are saying about the “protecting the price”, but the irony of that is the price does get out, and it does hurt the brand. It usually becomes a slippery slope too, once you do one deal, 6 retailers will call asking “what else do you have???”, and I should know, I made those calls all the time!
You have to sprinkle in enough truly great wines at well below market price, and it doesn’t have to always be an OMG price either. Folks are just as content with getting Insignia at 25% off (since it’s basically the same price everywhere) as they are getting some single vineyard Barolo for $29.99 for at least a good producer.
It doesn’t have to be revenge. The old distributor just doesn’t want to be selling past vintages in competition with the latest releases and they don’t want their sales people devoting resources to a product they won’t be selling in the future.