Sure, maybe. But that’s not the way the piece was written. Starting at 21 and with exactly what background in wine? So not knowing him and having no ill-will towards him, I’m thinking that he’s like a lot of other people who fall into wine and fell the need to show their bona fides ASAP, so the Ravenswood Zin they might have picked up is quickly replaced by something with a higher cool factor.
The best buyers I know are generally people who aren’t really wine geeks so much as people who have a sense of what their customers are going to pick up in what ranges, and how much $10 wine they need to justify the $50 wines. They’re running businesses and they know that this wine isn’t going to sell at $20 but it will sell at $12, and that wine might go for a little more. And yes, if it has some points, that’s good because many people won’t trust the store that’s selling the wine to be objective about it. If they can afford to, those people hire one or several wine geek types so that the customers who like that can feel good talking to them, and then everybody’s happy.
Seems like that’s what WINEX did, in addition to keeping their website stripped down and easy to navigate. It’s one of the best online stores IMO.
Funny thing is - he’s talking about the wine to have with the backyard grill. Inexpensive stuff? Uh oh. Good luck avoiding those people who simply can’t control themselves and whip out pen and pad to write TNs if they see a bottle of wine somewhere.
Having worked ITB I had a steady stream of sample bottles to work with. While I did buy wines I frequently poured samples down the drain due to sheer volume. I would occassionally leave open samples with buying accounts at the end of the day so they could enjoy them.
Vendors sometimes leave sealed bottes as gifts for good accounts.
I get that. Although I have no issues with BevMo (although I don’t trust their storage), I find it funny that the wine buyer for one of the premier wine shops on the West Coast headed straight to BevMo once he had to pony up for his own wine.
Like Frank and many others, I used to see him at WineX, and although I don’t know him, I wish him the best in his new business.
Not sure what’s hard to get here - aside from a convoluted article.
Kyle’s a sharp guy who has been able to learn the wine business from the ground floor during 20 yrs at arguably one of the best and most successful wine stores in California if not the U.S. He and a colleague left Winex to pursue a business opportunity that i would assume must’ve been impossible to refuse. I can’t see anything that suggests the business will be relegated to the lower-priced spectrum of wine. The content of the sideshow would obviously corroborate this.
My take on the article is the Times and/or the author intended to publish an article about people discovering lesser-priced wines. For whatever reason, they co-mingled this concept with an attempt at a reality story about Kyle’s job change, and threw in a ref to BevMo for just to further confuse the story line. I did think it was interesting to show how an ITB guy finds life on the other side of things. But, I certainly didn’t take this as a guy’s conversion to inexpensive wines.
The Times does (and has) purchased many of their wines to review through WineEx, hence the connection.
But my thought after reading the article was; with probably 7000-8000 SKU’s at Wine Exchange, how many wines could he have been turning away being so focused on flaws? With a business model like that you need product just to feed the beast. They sell a lot of wine.
I use to shop at WineEx all the time when I lived in SoCal. Loved their Saturday tastings. Unless something changed, you could find all sorts of good wines in the $20-30 range there. Not sure what his epiphany was, even after reading the article. Also, the WineClub Santa Ana had a nice do it yourself wine tasting bar where they used an honor system for tasting a wide range of priced wines any day of the week.
Decent to good wines at reasonable prices are always available and always have been. I don’t know anyone who only drinks $100+ wines. I tend to find these “come to Jesus” articles as good copy, but also a bit of a straw man discussion.
Fascinating concept this. Let us suppose, just for argument’s sake, that someone was introduced to California Cabernet in the late '70’s early 80’s drinking wines from the '73 vintage onward. Let us further suppose that this individual had access to the best of the lot at, oh let’s say, $8.50 - $12.00 or so per bottle. A real love a California cab might result from this that could potentially carry him forward for many, many years. Now, as we all know, life happens. Children, mortgages, etc., etc. So maybe this poor sod drinks up the last of his cellar in the early 90’s and gently falls asleep, unaware of all that is wine until say around 2005 or so. So Rip Van Wino wakes ups, shakes off his sleep and decides to renew his former drinking habits. You see where this is going don’t you? WTF! You want WHAT for these wine? You mean to tell me that my table wine of 1980 is now going to set me back a car payment per bottle and I will still have to cellar it? What is a poor mountaineer to do?
Two things here then. First, I feel this guy’s pain - or at least the pain of all of those who have had to take a cut in wine budget (and I suspect that the ol’ boy who wrote the article in question is not going to suffer long as he appears to be returning to the business to support his habit). Secondly there is the question of how does one develop a taste for better wine starting from the bottom up? I know what I am looking for in California Cabs because I had the opportunity to taste widely among the best. What about the poor (er, economically challenged) individual looking to develop a taste for Burgundy (to pick an extreme example)? Perhaps material for a thread of its own, but I am curious to know how many people started at the top and worked their way down as opposed to those who started with the less expensive and worked their way up.
And, crazy as it may sound for wine buyer after 20 years, I literally had almost no wine at home. Winex, while I was there, WAS my cellar. I had a monthly stipend and used it to continually taste anything new that came in. Essentially, my world was a world of onesies and twosies, as I constantly continued to try and hone my skills. I never though about stashing wine cuz I was surrounded by a ton of it every day! Live and learn.
That being said, now that I will be doing my own thing I hope to be successful enough to stash some wine for myself moving forward. I regret not doing it before…