I think this answers the original question of the thread.
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Wow. I am so glad I am done with them.
I was just reading this. I mean, minus the hookers, what’s the difference between this and John Fox? There’s still a chance we could hear about hookers… 
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Geez, if they had offered me hookers in lieu of the 2016 Bordeaux they owed me I would at least have considered the deal! 
In all seriousness, this is all extremely unsurprising. Like @YLee above, I’m so glad I got out and managed to get a refund. Though I would have preferred the actual wine or the market value thereof…
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Some very interesting details in here.
None more interesting than KKR buying Mumm Rose! Ha. You would think they would at least go for NV Krug.
Idk, I’ve been hearing great things about Total Wine’s Winery Direct program. At least they would have been able to fill the order.
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All the ny post articles and this article are very informative but they all miss the core problem in my opinion. As a person who has worked right there for 15 years the simple fact is their pricing has always been 15-30% too high. And they had minimal value regions like the loire, Beaujolais, etc. it was basically the top 5 wine areas overpriced. That’s fine for the uninformed and for the old days when wine pricing could be argued to be reasonable. But constantly going in and seeing things too expensive made me only go there when desperate. It it was a dinosaur 10 years ago in my opinion with old timers and corporations propping it up too long. Management could have combined the historical classicism and added a piece of the nearby crush wine with some new areas of the world at a more reasonable level and evolved into the new world. It is a shame as there was a brand/cache to it and it is sad to think of the idea of sherry going away but again the reality is that it hasn’t been good since at least when they moved from the main place 20 years ago.
I’m not sure that pricing had anything to do with this downfall. Plenty of retailers that don’t play the pricing game are thriving. My guess is that they failed to develop new clients. We (Domaine) pick up from pretty much every major NY retailer, and the one that MAYBE came up once a year was Sherry Lehmann. That should tell you something considering most of the NY retailers we have a regular schedule for of at least once a month.
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There are two Sherry Lehman threads with very similar content. Could the moderators please combine them.
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I’m sure that’s true. Reading the story, it seems they were also hurt by sky-high rent ($1.6 million a year) and the depopulation of Midtown offices since 2020. Plus, the new owner was prone to draw on the inventory for entertainment.
I’m going to guess that those were accelerating factors, but there had to be underlying issues prior. They were also famous for their Hampton’s runs, so not sure why the business didn’t pivot during the pandemic better?
I was at Zachys during the pandemic, and in April we were drowning in shipping orders. We had two armies of people pulling and packing orders. We were ordering 5X the quantity we needed on certain things just to make sure we weren’t running out. For SL not to get that windfall as well means they didn’t make good business decisions prior.
From my observation walking by the store for years, they spent the money on rent, rather than a functional website, which is the modern equivalent of a high street address.
I don’t disagree. But the pandemic seems to have different retailers differently. It took a toll on Chambers, for instance, even though they have a great online business.
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Chambers made choices. They chose to close the store front. I can’t think of another retailer that did that.
The number of people I know in retail that were negatively impacted business wise by the pandemic still fits on 1 hand with room to keep counting.
My office has over looked Sherry-Lehman for 15 years and I might have bought 3 bottles per year there, a random Burgundy that they just happened to have in stock, a gift etc. For me they simply did everything wrong including having a bad selection of things I cared about. The floor staff was not knowledgeable. When they did hav a wine I wanted it was never actually in the store, always offsite. The prices were not great. I just assumed they were very successful at targeting another customer base.
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I recall going in there, and they had some cool stuff (Dry River comes to mind), but honestly anything they had that was cool was available around the corner at Crush for less (and to your point, in the store). They would have Rousseau on the shelf, but at some price that wasn’t for me.
Overall, the process was too complicated for me, and not for my budget. This was circa 2016/2017 when I worked in the area.
Exactly my experience when I worked a block away from SL at Bloomberg for four and a half years!
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There are multiple factors that led to their demise as outlined above.
I think in the end they relied on the ‘rich’ individual who did not mind spending 150% or more mark up on first growths, grand cru’s, etc,