I can sell Tavel year round while the other roses dwindle to nothing until Spring and Summer.
The producer sets the allocation. Recently had a conversation with a great Piedmont producer. His American importers were constantly beating him over the head to reduce prices. Came to the US and toured and regularly saw his wine, he was selling for $29, selling retail $80-$85/ bottle. Got really pissed off and sliced the American market allocation by over half. Increased his Asian allocation and Was selling to Hong Kong at $35/ btl and never heard a word about price. Market Allocations are a funny thing.
You are assuming that market demand is pacifyable for Coche/Raveneau without constricting the potential market by raising prices. As I said previously, I passed on Coche/Raveneau allocations for the past couple of years because at the KL wholesale prices, we don’t have clients for them and it isn’t worth the carrying cost to wait for one to find us. The local effect is that it isn’t worth trying really hard to shoehorn KL wines into our BTG program because the allocated items we would get are worthless to us. We’re sort of ending up there with just about everything. In a way, it’s really liberating as it is now really an even playing field for wines that come across our path and we work with suppliers by how attentive and easy they are to work with rather than because they have a particular book.
The allocations we pass on are finding other buyers. I’m really curious where this leads in a few years as I can’t imagine there is much movement for those SKUs.
I was asked to review a deck for a business aiming to utilize this virtual inventory. It’s an idea that really only works in a place like NY and even there, I think that implementing JIT would be difficult.
i’d love to see the deck if you’re able to share it.
but to be clear, this isn’t about JIT. it’s about access to purchase as with buying from a distributor or broker, etc. Just another catalog of items to buy.
As a storage customer myself, there’s an annoying amount of friction and time associated with selling off wines i no longer care about. If they were just listed on a private platform at a price i determined, they could be lifted any time by anyone, and the storage facility would handle logistics. i’d be happy to pay a % for that.
So this is an issue of margins, and not so much allocation.
A different importer would 1) drop the prices to a point that doesn’t make them look like a greedy pig 2) most likely would not have a DTC program to fulfill.
I mean, the DTC has been around longer than Kermit as a national importer. I’m not here to defend KLWM, a lot of what they’ve done has left me less of a customer. That being said, it’s easy to say “there’s a better way to handle it” but I’m not sure that there is.
I’m really interested to see how it goes for Fourrier in CruRated after leaving Rosenthal. Maybe that’s the only workable model for some of these Burgundies but I think Fourrier is close to the line where it is practical.
This would be great. US market is adamant, it seems, on triple mark-ups and 20% commissions to move wine… too much friction cost. All the UK shops are 10% and have built large volume businesses around that. One day, a storage house will figure it out and become the go-to place to store, sell and buy… would just take moving down to 10%!
can go even lower with marketplace efficiencies. the first storage facility in a good restaurant market to figure this out takes all the marbles. amazing market capture and lock in.
Jean-Marie is working multiple importers in the US now, and I believe they’re both selling to consumers.
With respect to Crurated, there are certain cuvees that are exclusive to it, but I’m not aware of any producer that’s using it as an exclusive distribution platform into the US (would be difficult, I expect).
Crurated is selling a wide range of Fourrier’s wines, primarily domain wines. Without checking carefully it seems like it’s all the domain wines, or most of them. Full disclosure - I’m a Crurated customer and have bought a lot from them. It’s been really interesting to see which releases they’ve had at very competitive (for the US) prices, and which have been less so. They still have a lot of fine-tuning to do on their site/business, but it’s been working really well for me so far.