I dont know how many people here are familair with Cypher. It was created when Four Vines was sold and a smaller more focused winery created. Well ive bought the last 5 or 6 wine club shipments and for those familair with th wines they have names like Anarchy, Loco, Peasant, Monarchy, Heretic etc.
Well i just got their latest mailer and im really bummed that they all of a sudden have shifted from a value based fun winery to a more cult type model. Is anyone else familiar and see this my way or am i looking at it strangely ?
If your a member look at the price of Library wines, its way high. Loco 2010 which i bought a case of last year for $350 as a regular drinker is now $70 a bottle which puts it up there as a celler wine. It just upsets me that the pricing is based on what they think they can get and not what is a good fair price like a Bedrock or Carlisle would be
Tasted there when it was Four Vines and after the change to Cypher. I always found the wines hot and overdone. Now I have even more reason to avoid them. Why not just pass? Are you a fan of the wines?
I can’t blame a business for selling their products for as much as they can get. But I’ll be pretty surprised if Cypher can get anywhere near $70/bottle for their wines, unless maybe RP just gave them all high 90s scores or something.
As for you, there’s plenty of other fish in the sea. Maybe try Villa Creek, Dover Canyon, Tablas Creek, and some of the wineries making Rhone and Zin blends in Paso for fair prices.
I got a reply on how they come up with pricing for library wines
They take release price add $10, then add $5 per year which seems reasonable. Then for any wine they have low stock levels of they then multiply by 1.5.
Now as these library wines are only available to wine club members I think the above is stepp but OK until they do the 1.5 which to me is basic gouging. A 2005 Loco for $120 just because they only have a dozen left is ridiculous, that was a $25-30 wine when released.
Just so we’re clear, they’re jacking up the prices for library vintages? That is kind of annoying, but you see it often and I rarely buy library releases from producers for that reason. A winery like Cypher, if you could find old vintages of theirs at Heritage or Winebid, they’re probably like $10-15 a bottle.
Have they significantly changed the new release prices like you thought when you started this thread? I don’t care for myself because I don’t buy them, but if they haven’t done that, you should probably correct the record here, so there isn’t a thread on WB claiming they’re charging $70/bottle for their wines suddenly if that isn’t true. That would be pretty unfair to the winery. Just a suggestion.
Correct, their new wine prices are pretty much unchanged, maybe $5 here or there.
Im talking about anything older than current release being jacked up.
The 2005 Loco they want $120 for is available elsewhere for $26. Im just mad because if every winery took the option of increasing prices until people stopped buying than a lot of our favourites wines would be out of reach.
Ron I quit several years ago. I think Christian is a character and fine winemaker. But I moved on. Have several older bottles going back to the late 2000s.