"Three Things They Don't Want You to Know"

Who's "they," you ask? It's restaurants, retailers, wineries and, yes, wine writers

http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/46784?icid=em_com

This Blog Post by Wine Spectator Veteran Matt Kramer is in my opinion a little, well...beneath him.    I'm a bit wary of anything that sets up a divide between the consumer and trade and you can't help but feel that the "and yes, wine writers" was thrown in reluctantly at the end to deflect potential fall-out.  Outside of the 'premox' portion about prematurely oxidizing white Burgundy, you can't really find a motive for a wine writer to be complicit in this supposed cover-up.  It almost makes you wonder if some waiter ticked him off by not recognizing him and charging him full price for a glass of Viognier.   There is nothing untrue, new or particularly revelatory in his "outing" of restaurateurs and retailers for being for profit, and his recommendations for diners somehow seem so ten years ago.   Yes you have a better selection by the bottle.  Yes your wine by the bottle will not be oxidized and will be a better deal.  If you don't know these things, where have you been?  It also doesn't really give credit to the many restaurants that have gone to great lengths to address these issues, from  vast  by the glass selections and wine flights to those fancy machines that keep the wine fresh and measure pours (A $70,000 investment for  a state of the art piece of equipment.)   There is a very real cost involved in wine by the glass (even if you didn't spend the $70k on one of those machines)...it's called waste.  Those complaining about the problem of open, oxidized wines are illustrating this point themselves.  If you don't sell any more than that one glass from the bottle quickly, down the drain the remainder of the wine and all your profits go.   What a bunch of robber barons.

How about revealing something useful...like there is no margin in wine compared to most retail businesses to begin with.  The moisturizing cream on your face, the shirt on your back (even if its from Ross!) and the shoes on your feet all fetched a fine return on investment.  When I worked in wine retail we were down the street from a Salon.  I couldn't help but notice the dichotomy of the difficulty many women had spending even $10 on a bottle of wine, while $100 or so of "product" dangled from their wrist in a fancy bag.

The whole Big Box world that we live in promotes this idea that having a margin for profit in your business somehow makes you a crook.  There is a misconception that Big Box stores are Robin Hoods bringing affordable goods to the masses.     Every one of these outfits are making plenty of money.  This doesn't make them crooks either, it makes them businessmen.   They may not be making their money on that bottle of Cliquot you can't believe your local shop would charge you so much for, or those fancy high end bottles Mr. Kramer is encouraging you to buy from them or an online outlet, but they are making it somewhere, and plenty of it.  I won't start talking about loss leaders...but I think as reasonable people in the world we all know these things to be true.  We just like a deal. And we don't want to feel bad about it.  Maybe it would be a little more fair to own that, and stop trying to make independent merchants feel they are immoral profit seekers. 

Of course you can shop around.  The remnants of prohibition and the puritan American approach to alcohol as a controlled substance makes for wildly different import/distribution tiers throughout the US which can translate to sometimes wildly different prices.  Again, this is a fact of laws binding the buying/selling practices of wholesalers, retailers and importers in your State, City and County...not a rape the consumer scheme.  You can seek out online product reviews and make your own selections.  You can find better deals on the internet.  You don't need your local wine shop to do these things for you, you can of course do them yourself.  But that takes a lot of time.  Now you're doing all the work.  Apparently diners have taken to price checking the bottles on wine lists before they order.  The somm makes a recommendation and Joe Q is on his i phone checking Parker reviews and retail prices on Wine Searcher.   So much for the dining experience.   And this gets to the heart of what I really dislike about this- the encouraging the consumer to mistrust the wine professional in front of them.  Don't take the Sommellier's word for it, take Matt Kramer's.

Lastly the they in the title, "Three Things They don't want you to know," also smacks a bit of the "Make them Pay" piece that Ben Gilberti wrote in the Washington Post many years ago (one that became something of a swan song as he departed his duties as bi-weekly wine critic not long after) opining bitterly about the occurrence of corked wines in restaurants and the lack of tastevin wielding Sommelliers to ferret them out before the foul liquid and vapors penetrated the innocent nostrils and taste buds of the all important critic...heh hem...customer.   A crime for which he wanted to "Make Them (the restaurants) Pay."   Gentlemen...get over yourselves.