An article in today’s LA Times. I thought it would be esp. interesting since many here know Kyle Meyer from his Wine Exchange days:
Bruce
BevMo? Really?
I guess I haven’t been paying attention. Didn’t know he left. Is there bad blood? Certainly Winex has better deals than BevMo.
J
I assume BevMo was selected as the place to shop for the article to show the sorts of wines that you can buy inexpensively that are fairly easy to find. And perhaps to show that as the ex-uber wine geek guy, he can find wines he and his family will enjoy at that sort of place.
Bruce
Curious about the special glasses that pull flaws out of wine…What is he referring to?
“Les Impitoyables” would be my guess.
For more than a century, the Peugeot name has been synonymous with French gourmet cooking. Recently, an opportunity arose for Peugeot to bring its penchant for quality and innovation to a family of wine products. With the Les Impitoyables collection, tasting becomes perfection. The literal translation of Les Impitoyables is, “The Pitiless” because theses glasses reveal everything about a wine – the good and the bad. As tools created for professionals, Les Impitoyables glasses intensify the characteristics of wine by enhancing their qualities or bringing out the slightest flaw.
Ah, thank you! $40 per glass is too rich for my blood though.
They both left right before the holidays last year. Don’t know the reason for the sudden departure of both of them though.
Wish them the best as I really enjoyed talking about wines and bike riding with him when I’d visit the store. But looks like I can do that again sometime soon when they get their biz up and running.
A little birdie told me they were getting into the China/Bordeaux business. Had a sneaky feeling they would show up on the Internet eventually. Nice guys and I am sure they will do well.
Did I misinterpret this, or did he really go through 100 bottles in less than 3 months? I guess if you’re having/sharing more than a bottle per day, then you don’t have much choice but to go for the entry level WA red blend or spanish Garnacha.
Employees going through 400-500 bottles per year sounds like a lot of overhead, but interestingly WinEx always has great prices. Samples? Anyway, it’s always interesting when wine industry insiders have to live like the other half who pay for wine. Suddenly price becomes part of the equation.
Don’t know him, but wish him all the luck he’ll need selling $10 btls of wine on the internet (before shipping). The article kind of implies that’s the bread and butter of their business plan, but it really can’t be, could it?
I don’t know anything about the guy, but it’s kind of sad that it took him 20 years to come by these realizations. What did he think his customers were buying the wine for?
One of my NJ wine accounts was a major “flaw monkey” who took enjoyment from berating me if a wine had flaws, at least in his mind.
He was at Wine Ex for a long time, as used to run into him a lot from way back, a lot like Jason I bet. I don’t get in there all that much these days, given my Envoyer discovery a few years back but I wish him well. Certainly doesn’t hurt that the LAT would write him up and get him some early exposure.
Bruce, did the link in the article to his new website work for you? It did not me.
I was surprised that the article seemed to say just that. Then the slideshow on the pre-webiste shows them tasting a bunch of high-end Burgundy and Bordeaux, so I don’t know what to expect.
I had a brief conversation with him some months ago, and my impression at the time was that was NOT the end of the wine market they planned to focus on.
Bruce
Frank–The article link is miscoded. If you just type in the name of the URL into your browser, you’ll get a “coming soon” page.
Bruce
Keith–Kyle (if he wishes) can certainly respond for himself. I will say that in the years I knew him when he was at Winex, he had a pretty good handle on a wide range of wine at a wide range of prices. If I asked him for a recommendation for a “value” wine in a certain section he handled, he was able to do that (assuming the section had “value” wines).
My take on the piece, knowing him, is that he spent all of those years as a wine buyer (and seller) tasting wines, looking for flaws, and trying to determine whether a particular wine was worth the tariff such that he would generally feel comfortable adding it to inventory. Trying to decide whether to carry a wine that retails for $50-$100+ is a very different process than picking a $10 wine for drinking yourself while working the grill.
Bruce
That was my take on it as well.
The article brings up a few questions;
If he never bought wine for himself before, how did he happen to have a 100 bottle stash?
How does a guy who goes through 100 bottles in less than three months go all those years without buying wine?
The article seems to imply that either he received a lot of free wine to take home or seldom drank wine at home before and only started doing so since leaving his job - and now that he has begun drinking at home, finds himself consuming roughly a bottle per day - and now that he has to pay for the wine he used to either get for free or did without has decided its okay to drink wine with flaws, that wine is really for greasing the evening, etc.
Not sure why this is a newsworthy.
Seems like he had a friend at the paper who wanted to help him publicize his new venture and a story was cobbled together.