It didn’t take long for a fair bit of feedback on the column I posted this week on the state of the wine industry.
There is indeed blood in the water, and some of it is the blood of innocents. Such as the prominent retailer who bought a palate of Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon at more than $100 a bottle wholesale, before the distributor slashed the price in half. His wholesale cost was higher than the now widely seen retail price of $89 per bottle.
So he’s underwater with dozens of cases of wine he can only sell at a loss.
Same as the wine merchant who bought 50 cases of Chateau Mouton at $600 a bottle wholesale, only to endure a long shipping delay as the market for expensive Bordeaux suffered a huge meltdown. By the time the Mouton arrived, his customers for it had vanished.
Add to that the reports I’m getting on Champagne sales heading into the important holiday season. "Dead in the water," one merchant told me. "Deader than dead."
This begs the question, should I even bother to review the upper-end wines if there is so little interest? My answer is an unequivocal yes, because all of those wines will eventually find a home. Hence they deserve to go under the microscope.
"Every wine has a price at which it will sell," a veteran sales rep for a major distributor told me. "We simply have to find that price."
Winery execs are now preparing their budgets for 2010, and you can be sure that most are taking a hard look at their price structure. The bet here is that scores of them will hit the reset button. It’s only a question of when, not if.
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