Originally published on August 12, 2009.
Did you hear it? Over wine distributor warehouses on Staten Island and Long Island and near the ports of New Jersey? What was it? A giant vacuum cleaner? A massive sieve? A colander from the great beyond?
No, it was the sound of many bottles of Rioja being sucked out of distributor warehouses and into retailers across New York. Specifically, Riojas from a number of old-school producers mentioned in a very good article by Eric Asimov of the New York Times.
Here’s what happens:
An article gets published in a major paper or wine publication. Specific producers are mentioned. Customers read the article and want the wines. Retailers know there will be customers asking for those wines, which means relatively quick and easy sales. So they call their distributors and order lots of whatever wine was mentioned. This creates a giant sucking sound as those cases of wine move from distributor warehouses onto shelves across the city.
OK, so this process really doesn’t make a sucking sound. It’s more like the clicking of cell phones and computer keyboards as orders are placed, followed by the drone of delivery trucks. But you get the picture.
Now I don’t generally chase the wines that appear in these articles. The Frankly Wines selection is so tightly edited, that there’s just not space for whatever wine happened to be mentioned in publication X the day before. It’s also a good bet that I’ll already have a wine from the region in question – something that I think offers similar or even better value. After all, it’s my job to find those wines and if I’m only reading about them in the paper, well, I’m not doing a very good job.
But sometimes, I already have one of the wines being mentioned. And this can be a bad thing. Sure, it’s nice to get the quick and easy sales that come when a wine is suddenly sought out by lots of customers. But that bad thing is the giant sucking sound. The sudden demand can pull all of the wine out of the system within a day or two. I either have to buy more – and I can never buy as much as the big guys that make a living at this game. Or I have to come to terms with a favorite wine’s impending unavailability and find a replacement. And that sucks. Literally. Or figuratively.
Or in this case, both.