Wine Quicky Mart

F

Frank Deis

Frank Deis
I don't know exactly how to put this. And I don't know if it is a nation wide phenomenon. But I am having a problem here in central New Jersey and I just want to know if it is something that others have noticed.

I have been buying wine in this area since I moved here in the early 1970's. I have found a variety of shops where the owner has been extremely serious about wine. These places have sent their employees around the world (Spain, Australia, Germany, wherever) to learn more about the wines there and to visit the wineries. Some of them had very subtle ways of doing business. Probably my favorite shop was one out on Route 22 where, if they noticed that a wine they had in stock was given a 97 rating by Wine Spectator, they would not put up signs and raise the price. Instead they would sell it at the same old price but only put out ONE bottle at a time. And when a regular customer recognized the bargain and bought it and left, they would put out ONE more bottle. Spreading the goodness. I thought that was an intelligent and admirable way to do business. And that inspired a certain loyalty in some customers at least.

Recently one after another of these wine shops have been sold to people who I think are ethnically Indian. And I have not noticed any sort of investment in the concept of fine wine, or understanding of what they are selling. Just last Friday I visited a shop that used to have the highest standards. We chose to go up there because we went on wine-searcher and saw that they had some Vieux-Telegraphe at a good price. When we got there, the price listed on the shelf bottles was TEN DOLLARS HIGHER per bottle than what it has said online. We asked and they got the manager, and he said (as if he were doing me a favor) "We will honor the internet price." So I got the bottles for $10 less.

But knowing that there was a dual price structure completely dissuaded me from buying other high end bottles unless I knew what the price ought to be. I bought some Pierre Peters Champagne because it was $32 and I had seen it for $40.

In fact I had seen it for $40 at the place I mentioned above -- the Route 22 store is now under Indian management. And I think the owner views all these wines as if they were cans of peas or sacks of flour.

Am I being unfair? Am I showing some racism here? I think this phenomenon is real, and I have no sense of prejudice against my many Indian students and teaching assistants. Is this a local phenomenon or something bigger?

F
 
"Bait and Switch" is not restricted to the ethnically Indian. It's fraud, no matter how you slice it.

As to the other thing of which you speak -- a store owner who knows and likes what he sells versus a store owner who can manage a balance sheet -- alas, this is the way of the world.
 
Frank,

I'm not sure what you're looking for here.

As Jeff says, a store owned by someone who loves the product is usually preferable to one owned by someone who doesn't; that's not really exclusive to wine.

Indians, having only recently arrived from a country with no wine-drinking culture to speak of, are less likely to be wine-lovers than Europeans; thus, the experience you describe above. But this all seems pretty obvious to me, so maybe I'm missing something about your complaint.

And yes, The Simpsons is a funny show.
 
As I think about it, it is very likely a local phenomenon. There has been a very large population shift in the time I have lived in Central NJ (35 years) and the population of my students has shifted dramatically as well. "Harold and Kumar" pretty much represents who I see in class, more and more Koreans and Indians, often Gujaratis like Kumar although I get students whose parents came from Calcutta and Kerala and all over the subcontinent including Pakistan.

And the grades in my classes have been climbing over the years, the performance of these kids is quite impressive.

But every time I go into one of my old style wine shops and see new management, I have to say "uh oh." And I have already explained why. The expectations are different and the attitudes are different. And I suppose business is business.

At any rate, there is still the Wine Library up in Union. I doubt if that place will ever change. But it is a long schlep from where I live.

F
 
OK, one last example. I guess I feel I need to talk about this because I have lived in a great environment for wine shopping, starting with Pino's a few blocks from my house (which was quite good when Vinnie Pino was alive and running the store) -- and it was just on Friday when I realized that the last good, big local wine shop was effectively over, gone. Full of bottles but not a good place to shop.

This was a couple of years ago, and the exact details are a little hazy. Let's say that someone here, whom I will call Jack Whitewood, inspired me to go looking for a special red Burgundy, which I will call Fordillon. Well, let's just call it Chevillon. And I went on Wine-Searcher and bang, found it in a store in Metuchen only a couple of miles up the road.

I looked for a variety of other wines, Italians or whatever, and found everything in this wonderful store, this same store in Metuchen. Everything I looked for, I found there. I was amazed, Metuchen is a small town and I couldn't imagine where this two acre wine warehouse would be, I had to go there. So I used Mapquest and figured out where I had to drive and went up there.

Once again I was shocked, because the store is the size of a Seven Eleven (or a Quicky Mart for that matter). Maybe a large 7-11. And I go looking on the shelves, and I find practically no red Burgundy at all, much less the Chevillon I had come for. I asked the clerk who went and found the manager, who explained that they were out of stock and they could easily order it for me. I said, "so I should leave my name and phone number?" and instead he asked for my credit card. The deal was that I had to pay the full price and then they would ATTEMPT to obtain the wine. Evidently the store manager had typed the entire catalog from their supplier into the online listing which wine-searcher.com had then picked up. And they had no overhead from storing the wine, the business plan was to sell it and THEN order it.

Well, maybe I should have just walked away but it was Chevillon after all and the thought of getting those bottles, which were not available many places, was too much for me so I did what he asked. The next six months were kind of awful, I kept calling and they would have to shuffle papers. At one point they explained that there was "a problem with customs" which (if true which I doubt) means that not only was the wine not in the shop but NOT IN THE COUNTRY when they advertised it and sold it to me. After six months I had decided to cancel the order and demand my money back (this was probably $200 that had been tied up with these clowns) but -- the wine came, I got it. Which left me substantially mollified. But I have not been back and it is one of a quickly growing list of places that I don't want to go back to. What I am saying is that this sort of behavior seems to be almost the rule instead of the exception here where I live. And it's distressing.

F
 
originally posted by Frank Deis:

This was a couple of years ago, and the exact details are a little hazy. Let's say that someone here, whom I will call Jack Whitewood, inspired me to go looking for a special red Burgundy, which I will call Fordillon. Well, let's just call it Chevillon. And I went on Wine-Searcher and bang, found it in a store in Metuchen only a couple of miles up the road.
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These guys are notorious for this kind of BS. There is a company in north Jersey that published the "database" that underlies their claimed inventory. This shop takes it to the utmost extreme of pretending.
 
originally posted by Frank Deis:
The deal was that I had to pay the full price and then they would ATTEMPT to obtain the wine. Evidently the store manager had typed the entire catalog from their supplier into the online listing which wine-searcher.com had then picked up. And they had no overhead from storing the wine, the business plan was to sell it and THEN order it.
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That's the Pennsylvania Special Liquor Order (SLO) system, except that Pennsylvania only asks for half the money up front. About half the time the wine shows up. I wasn't surprised that the $35 magnums of Allemand never did...
 
Well, maybe I should have just walked away but it was Chevillon after all and the thought of getting those bottles, which were not available many places, was too much for me so I did what he asked. The next six months were kind of awful, I kept calling and they would have to shuffle papers. At one point they explained that there was "a problem with customs" which (if true which I doubt) means that not only was the wine not in the shop but NOT IN THE COUNTRY when they advertised it and sold it to me. After six months I had decided to cancel the order and demand my money back (this was probably $200 that had been tied up with these clowns) but -- the wine came, I got it. Which left me substantially mollified. But I have not been back and it is one of a quickly growing list of places that I don't want to go back to. What I am saying is that this sort of behavior seems to be almost the rule instead of the exception here where I live. And it's distressing.
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Doesn't this kind of thing fall under the caveot emptor part of wine buying: deal only with who you know (through the wine community) to be responsible merchants? I wouldn't want to waste time with folks from anywhere who dickered you around to support their profitability. I mean, bad business is bad business, whether in Punjabi or Anglais.
 
Well, I do learn my lesson and stay away. But I am a hopeful and trusting soul and it takes me a bad experience to learn my lesson. And in the long run, that wasn't even such a bad experience. But I hated how they do business and I won't go back. And what makes me sad is that that sentence is true now of most of the places I used to buy wine. Too many dual lists, too many cheap online prices and high shelf prices, too much double dealing.

F

PS and when I placed the order he said it was "typically about two weeks" until they got the wine.

PPS and most of these places I have described ARE the places I have been dealing with for years. The same building, the same fixtures, the same girls at the cash register. You have to learn by experience that everything is completely different...
 
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