Wine Blog

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Posted by: Trudy and Rob

Friday, April 18, 2008 9:46 AM

I was browsing the wine section in one of our local grocery stores recently, noting what was on the shelves and maybe hoping to find a good bargain. However, as I perused the selection, there was really nothing there, even among the sale items, that made me want to reach for my wallet and pony up some dollars. Part of it has to do with the fact that we already have a lot of wine, and a large part of it was the relative mediocrity of the bottles in front of me. For the sale or bargain bin wines, a bargain is not always a bargain. The store may just be trying to clear old inventory or slow sellers from it's shelves. Don't get me wrong, there were certainly bottles on the shelves worth drinking and I even had some of the same bottles in front of me down in the cellar at home. Not many though...there just wasn't much there that was too exciting. When purchasing, I guess I look for a wine that will fit the bill for it's intended use. If I'm cooking with it (and never cook with anything you wouldn't actually want to drink), I'll look for a decent, well made bottle in about the $6 to $8 dollar range. I try to make sure it's at least good enough to reward me if I take a few sips while I'm working on my culinary delight. If I'm buying it to serve some folks who don't especially care about wine, I'll get something a bit more pricey but not necessarily anything that might have wine geeks (like me) beating down our door begging for samples. But mostly, I don't buy wine in grocery stores at all.

So, where do I buy the wine? Many places. Locally, as I may have mentioned, we have three very good wine outlets. The Piccadilly chain (Royal Plaza and The Crossings locale particularly), Sunsinger, and Corkscrew all provide good selections. At Piccadilly, I tend to consult Doug (at Royal), Sam (at the Crossings) or wine director Paul Simpson if I have questions or need help ordering. At Sunsinger, owner Mark Yarbrough is a good man to consult. While I don't know the names of the Corkscrew folks, they are always helpful and have good stuff on their shelves as well. You can work with any of these establishments to locate the wine you want and usually receive discounts on purchases of a case or more.

One of the problems locally is that the wine that I might want is not always available here. I may have to go up to Chicago where I tend to use the Wine Discount on Elston avenue (and branches elsewhere up there) or Sam's just off North Avenue. Not infrequently, however, the sought after wine might not even be distributed to Illinois or might be totally sold out here. In those cases I use mostly west coast vendors such as the Wine Stop and the Wine Club, both based in California. The advantage here, aside form the fact that they actually have the wine I'm looking for, is that as of now you don't have to pay tax on out of state purchases. The big disadvantage, of course, and growing bigger all of the time, is that you do have to pay shipping charges which are usually more than what the tax might cost if purchased locally.

Lastly, but not infrequently, I purchase directly from the wineries themselves. They of course are eager to sell you their products and frequently offer case discounts themselves. Much of the time, the very best a winery has to offer does not get distributed here or the quantities might be so highly allocated that the chances of finding that dream bottle are about the same as Bill O'Reilly deciding to join the Communist party. In cases like these one frequently has to get on a winery's mailing list and wait until the good stuff becomes available. Much of the time there's even a wait to get on the mailing list! Oh well, there's always another stock and there's always another good bottle of wine.

For those of us that live in Illinois, we are fortunate to live in what's known as a reciprocal state where we can purchase wine from out of state and folks living elsewhere can purchase from us. I'm kind of glad that our elected representatives don't try to regulate our morality too much (and with the Illinois and Chicago political theatrics that we frequently witness, it would be kind of like the pot calling the kettle black) although there was a little known adverse (for the wine consumer) step taken fairly recently to limit availability to the consumer.

We have a three tier system for wine purchases in Illinois. The winery usually sends their product first to a distributor (the middle man) who then sells the product to the local retailer such as Piccadilly. Then we, the consumer, buy it. Naturally, price markups occur at each step along the way. The lobby folks for the distributors convinced our sterling legislators to impose limits on the amount of wine purchased from out of state (not in state, of course) although I can't remember exactly what those limits are. The very self serving, very transparent reasoning for this goes along the lines that we don't want our underage 12 year olds purchasing multiple cases of expensive wine. I know this happens all of the time (not). It's basically a thinly veiled attempt at protectionism. The sad part of this is that there's a lot of very good wine out there that is unavailable for purchase in Illinois or even downstate. All too often, my friendly local wine retailers have told me that they are unable to get a certain bottling. It either doesn't come into the state or doesn't make it south of Chicago. Now don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge the local wine folks their profit. I've found them very good to work with and I'm glad that they are around. Although as sensitive to the dollar as most people, if a wine is within a few bucks more expensive locally than what I might find elsewhere, I try to keep the business in town and support the locals. We are lucky to have several sources of knowledgeable wine folks with good products in our local outlets. I don't like what the powerful middle man has done to the consumer though. I suppose it's not unique to our culture.

OK, I'm off the soapbox now and am looking ahead to what I might chat about next. It'll probably be something about the steps in making wine and maybe how this relates to your purchase if you want to score the good stuff. As always, any wine questions are always welcome And be wary of those mediocre grocery store wines!

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Previous Entries

• 6/5/2008
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• 5/23/2008
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• 4/29/2008
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