A few years ago, i would have been thrilled to have these wines and now it is just a nightmare. We could sell the Séchet and the La Forest for 70 € and the Chablis for 30 € but the prices listed on winesearcher for Germany are 165 € for the Sechet 173 € for La Forest (2020 vintage) and 100 € for the Chablis (2020 vintage). If I put them in the shop, one gets bombarded with emails from consumers who have never bought anything and if they were to buy these, would never buy anything again unless it is such trophies. The emails get more and more aggressive the more one turns down wannabee customers, Iget more and more frustrated and places like Winebeserkers become a great place to vent these frustrations,
I believe as the producer wants them to be sold, one must sell, it would be easy to horde these . But in my mind better not to have these bottles these days or sell to a champagne producer at the correct prices and in turn have them bump up the allocation.
Last time you bought this up I mentioned my own approach which is to package them up with other high quality wines in at normal margins such that the total package price is at least the market value of the rare wines. (Offering to good customers first).
I’d add that it’s amazing how rude and entitled some of the message one gets is. Good use of the block functions.
Bundling has advantages and disadvantages. A customer made me aware of this. Customers sometimes buy bundles and then keep the bottle they want and sell the rest. They make a loss but probbaly pay less than they would, if they had bought at extortionate prices. One just has to look at Idealwine to see how many bottles are listed from current releases.
It is the same with setting a minimum turnover per customer. There is one dealer in Germany, who sets the limit at 15000 €. Customers have told me they buy and sell to get above the limit.
I think Russel’s approach works for special wines like this. The value approach to get access is in a way transparent and logical but perhaps with less heart (and it’s a business).
Another very fair way of doing it is to offer the wines to the same customers who kept buying the wines over the years (and if someone drops off offer the wines to the next in line good customers who you feel enjoys and like the wines).
I benefit from the latter (a bottle or two of each bottling) the retail could if he wished, sell the wines for 7-10 times the prices he sells it me. I always buy some of his other wines, and I hope that shows appreciation to him.
If you work with restaurants that are good customers and offer the wines at fair prices then that another route I would consider if I were in your shoes.
Those bottles can be a blessing, at least as long as you don’t dangle them in-front of a bunch of wine folks (without offering a bottle or two).
You should keep a separate mailing list of your regular customers, maybe separate lists from that of folks who like specific categories. Could even cross-reference these lists with information from your point of sale software about who has purchased Dauvissat in the past.
I’ll take them all and video myself drinking them, hows that? I’ll leave a $1000 bond (to show Im not a flipper) that you return after I post the video.
This is how I have observed most trophies/unicorns get handled in the retail channels I’m familiar with. This loyal customer appreciates the opportunity, even if it is just a bottle or two.
Put them quietly up on the shelves one day, not on the same day as each other (to avoid someone cleaning the shelves out in one go). No fanfare, and definitely not online.
If someone is browsing and finds them, it is because they are specifically looking for Chablis / white burgundy, hence more likely to be bought by someone genuinely interested in the wines, than the prestige, or making a quick buck or 50 by flipping.
It’s all a bit tiresome. The Dauvissat wines are good but not worth making a huge fuss about, there is plenty of Chablis that is just as good; though not much that is to my taste these days, nor that will last in the way that was once its special signature.
I’ve seen it with a number of producers, across different regions, where a perfectly good, perhaps slightly under-appreciated producer, becomes the latest darling of a leading critic, and/or indeed gets talked up on wine forums. The prices escalate rapidly and what might have been decent value (and that value very much a part of the appeal), becomes nonsensically awful value, driven by groupthink / hype train, though presumably the buyers are happy they’ve got some wine from the ‘hot new star’. I found this especially daft with La Ca’Nova in Barbaresco, a solid (if a little foursquare / tannic) producer whose wines went unnoticed for many years. Galloni then talked them up, and all of a sudden they were hipster wines
I feel like this topic has been discussed at nauseam here on Berserkers in some form or another.
There’s no perfect way to sell and allocate rare wines that one gets in limited quantities. No matter which approach one takes, they are bound to get complaints from one customer or another. No store gets enough of these wines to make all of their customers happy.
Do what makes sense for your store and lets you soundly sleep at night and let the chips fall where they may.
As for the issue of reselling wine, there’s no real way to get around that, for better or worse, the secondary market is the sole form of access to many for some of these rare wines, so it’s something that’s here to stay
I don’t think that’s true, but curious as to what you think is just as good as Dauvissat? If Dauvissat hadn’t suffered premox issues in the 2000s, the wines would be significantly more expensive today.
I agree that this topic has been discussed ad nauseam but there is to my mind no satsifactory solution.
In my mind, it is a bit like what I would call the Keller syndrome. If I were to sell cheap and know the customer would drink the bottles and they offered continual business no problem. But if I sell cheap and they are flipped, why should the second party make the big money. I totally understand a producer wants his part of profits which in effect leads to Teufelskreis or a vicious circle. I totally understand say the likes of Egly or Keller wanting a bigger share of the profits but in turn with such horrendous prices the wines or in Egly’s case champagne becomes obsolete or only accessible to a small minority as Galloni has said in a Liv-Ex interveiw, they have the necessary cash to buy the wines but not necessarily the taste to truly appreciate them.
The so called fine wine drinker (trophy hunters) faction hates bundling but it seems the lesser evil.
Keller and Egly pricing are a function two separate causes. In Keller’s case, the price increases have mostly been a function of very large demand for the wines. The price of the wines ex-cellar continue to be modest. And as much as prices for Keller GGs have climbed in the secondary market, they have seen on average a decline from their high a few years ago and seem to have settled at a steady price. In Egly’s case the price increases seem to be for the most part due to price increases at the domaine itself. Whether you find the wines worth the ex-cellar or subsequent retail prices or not is a matter personal preference.
As far as reselling goes, as I said, it’s a function of the realities of life. The secondary market exists because some don’t have access to the wines via a primary source. Even the likes DRC, who probably takes some of the strictest measures to prevent resellers still can’t avoid it. One can’t really have their cake and eat it too. If a store sells an allocated wine for less than the market/wine-searcher price, it’s acknowledging the risk of there being some flippers. The minute they raise the price to the ‘market price’, they reduce the chances of flippers, but risk frustrating some customers. Each comes with benefits and downsides. One can’t just take the benefits of both approaches with the downside of neither.
A note on the Galloni comment, one start leaning into Aesop’s fox territory when they begin to cast judgement on who is and isn’t fit to enjoy a wine. I’ve had some great, rare and expensive wines shared with me when I was just starting out my journey. Could I necessarily appreciate them fully at the time? If I’m being honest, probably not. Nonetheless, they were memorable and formative part of my wine education. Conversations over who should and shouldn’t drink a wine based on a perceived notion of their wine experiences and potential appreciated of said wine just reeks of snobbery to me.
Many wineries do not allow retailers to sell at market prices. If a DRC retailer were to sell at market prices, they would lose their allocation. So in reality, it’s either sell at allocation prices and live with some flippers, or sell at market prices and lose the allocation.
Raveneau’s wines are better, but pretty uneven. Louis Michel and Duplessis make wines much more to my taste and there are sometimes really great bottles from others which unfortunately rarely stay the course. There’s nothing clever about age for its own sake, of course, but modern styles tend to the fruity and boring when released even from top producers. If we wish to enjoy Chablis nowadays we have to accept that it is an entirely different wine to what it was in the twentieth century. I tend not to be terribly impressed, which means that I drink it much less than previously- which obviously means that my knowledge is now pretty patchy.
