A producer can’t control where their wines end up if they are sold to a retailer. A wine retailer really can’t refuse to sell to a customer that appears in their shop and is willing to buy the wine just because they don’t look like a local.
However, if a producer wants to sell their wines to certain restaurants and hopes to have their wines appear on the restaurant’s list, they might not want to have these wines suddenly appearing in Singapore, New York or Stockholm, if the wines are sold exclusively to a restaurant in Paris or San Sebastian. In this case they might drop the restaurant from their allocation list.
What the producer is asking is that if they contact the retailer later, and tell them the bottle number ABC123 you sold has turned up at auction. Please don’t sell our wine to Mr/Mrs X who bought bottle ABC123 again. Without naming Mr/Mrs X (because they don’t ask for that data)
Then they expect the retailer not to sell to Mr/Mrs X again.
We used to do a more simple version of this ourself. For rare wines (implicitly sold below ‘market’) we used to stamp and number the bottles. If we found them then on the secondary market we didn’t work with the client again.
does any of this have a material affect on the market dynamics? selosse prices are still out of control. initial is ~200 euro in a restaurant if you are getting a ‘friendly’ price and usually a lot more.
If a retailer does this with private clients without admitting to keeping this kind of registry first, that’s a big no-no regarding GDPR things here in the EU.
If private customers accept that their purchases are kept track of, then all’s fine.
However, it’s a different thing when a retailer - or a restaurant or an importer - is dealing with businesses. GDPR things don’t have to comply to businesses the same way they have to do with private customers.
Certainly! I didn’t comment on how people are or should be conducting their business, or which way is more or less effective, just what is the correct way from the legal standpoint.
If a business would want to keep track of their customers and their purchases in secret without telling them, it’s their prerogative - although maybe not a very legal one.
my point is more so about the lack of effectiveness of the chip itself; people will always find work arounds if there is an incentive. even if they successfully eliminate resellers from the distribution chain, someone else will likely take their place. but yes when i was a buyer of selosse it was marginally more expensive than other top producers where now the spread has obviously widened substantially.
A few years ago the wine buyer for a well-known restaurant in San Francisco told me that he derived a fair proportion of his income from re-selling allocations of famous wines. It’s pretty common.
Allocating more to restaurants definitely can impact secondary market dynamics. That restaurant-only 1er cru cuvée of DRC is presumably cheapest ex-cellar in the lineup, but I’ve seen them outside of EU through gray market channel, and funnily enough, it was sold higher than their grand cru just due to lack of supply.
I’ve also heard Raveneau sells so much to restaurants in EU that their secondary market price is sky high while it’s really not hard to find their premier cru for €200 or so at a restaurant in Europe. However I’m not sure how true that story is though it does make sense.
Similarly, I’d suspect NFC would also impact the secondary market dynamics. It won’t eliminate secondary market, but probably less supply to the gray market hence potentially higher price, assuming production or demand don’t change.
perhaps i am mistaken, but i read up thread that the motivation for the chip was to get the bottles into the glasses of consumers, ie discourage selling allocations to a higher bidder. my point was, so long as some consumers will pay very high prices for selosse, there will exist a seller with an allocation even if they risk getting cut out in the future. and yes raveneau market prices are hugely disconnected from their cellar price, however i do not believe this is a direct result of how much they sell to restaurants. importer/distributor plays a huge factor, just check out the difference in release pricing for raveneau in quebec (price controlled) vs stateside via king kermit.
I’m not sure if we’re disagreeing on any point, but my comment was purely if NFC tips disincentivize consumers to sell allocated bottles to the market and my take is yes, and if that happens, theoretically, the secondary market is affected simply because there’s less supply. This doesn’t mean secondary market would magically disappear and it won’t, but it would be very likely impacted by the NFC tags. Even if one can disable NFC tags of their bottles, not everyone is so incentivized to do so for profit.
That said, I don’t disagree that its effectiveness is questionable, but we have no means to know.
I have no argument with you on the legality, and while I am not an attorney everything you are saying makes complete sense in the context of my broader business experience.
My issue is more of a philosophical one, and it is part of a broader fundamental problem I have with emerging trends in luxury marketing where emotional manipulation and pushing FOMO are being used as tactics to support higher and higher prices relative to the quality of what is being sold.
It is a bit different here- the desire to keep the wines in the hands of serious enthusiasts is a genuine motivation, but at the end of the day I just do not think trying to impact the secondary free market is a wise ideal in the long run.
But as long as there are 10 buyer for every bottle of Selosse out there- they are not likely to suffer in any way as a result of the sentiment of me and like-minded consumers.
