Category: Behind the Counter

Random 4th of July Musings from Behind the Counter

Originally published on July 3, 2009.

Fireworks are really hard to draw. Tried to make the chalkboard all festive with a few fireworks and they turned out looking like spiders….to the point where I felt compelled to note that they’re not spiders. Otherwise I’m sure we would have had more than one person come in and ask what spiders have to do with the 4th of July.

Not a big surprise, but everyone wants something inexpensive, white or rose. Or sparkling. To go with their 4th of July sparklers, perhaps?

More of a surprise…garbage services don’t pick up the night before the 4th of July. Apparently it’s a garbage holiday. They don’t tell you this, but it’s rather obvious when you come in the next day and all your carefully broken down boxes are still sitting there on the curb, still carefully broken down and waiting to come back inside.

There are a lot of tourists in town. This is good. We like tourists because they all seem to like wine!

Sparkling Wine Month at Frankly Wines

Originally published on July 3, 2009.

It’s Sparkling Wine month at Frankly Wines! If Hallmark can whip up a holiday whenever it feels like it, so can I. But it’s much more fun to get a bottle of something than a card – especially if you’re buying it for yourself.

Back in my corporate life, I spent a lot of time watching Champagne brand managers obsess over getting people beyond thinking that bubbles were only for New Years and a few other Special Occasions such as Weddings, Birthdays, and Anniversaries. And possibly Superbowl Victories. I think the statistic was average Champagne consumption in the US was barely a 1/2 bottle of Champagne per person per year. (The number could be wrong, but it was very very low.)

That statistic was for Champagne only – it didn’t take into consideration the many other sparkling wines that don’t come specifically from the (not so little) part of France called “Champagne”. To a Champagne brand manager, the distinction mattered. As a store owner, I could care less. I just like to have bubbles on hand for people who want to celebrate Holidays, Occasions, or simply enjoy a nice glass of something that happens to sparkle.

So back to Sparkling Wine Month. It’s July – it kicks off with sparklers of the fireworks kind. So we decided to just run with that theme and feature sparklers of the liquid kind. Everything from Prosecco, to Cava, to Lambrusco to Cremant d’This, Cremant d’That, Cerdon-Bugey, Sekt, Lambrusco, Asti spumante or frizzante – and even actual Champagne.

Check out our full schedule of tastings. These are all free, stop-in-for-a-sip-or-two sort of tastings. Nothing formal or fancy – we’ll get to that later. But if you’re in the neighborhood, or looking for an excuse to get to the neighborhood, we’re happy to provide one. And we’re happy to let you stand around, sip, and gab about sparkling wine as long as you like.

And just in case you can’t kick the habit of thinking of bubbles as a gift – we’ll even stuff some tissue paper into your bag to make it look festive.

The Paying of Bills

Originally published on June 19, 2009.

One of my daily chores is to pay my distributor bills. This involves sitting down with a big check book, writing actual checks (today’s are $26.68, $45.00, and $400), addressing actual envelopes, and affixing them with actual stamps. Then the challenge is remembering to take them out of my bag and put them in an actual mailbox at some point during the day (because this is New York and no one has an actual mailbox of their own to put letters in for postpeople to pick up.)

Now I can already hear some of you asking, “Why don’t you just do this electronically. It seems a little silly to be wasting real checks and real stamps when you can just pay your bills electronically.”

And I would answer that yes, it’s a little silly, but that’s just the way it is in the wild world of New York wine.

“Why’s that?” you ask. (Even if you don’t ask, I’m going to tell you.)

In New York, as everywhere, wine sales are highly regulated by the state. In the case of payment terms, every retailer and restaurateur is given 30 day terms. So if the wine is delivered on June 1st, the distributor has to get your check for that delivery by July 1st. If they don’t get it by that day, there’s a 5 day grace period and then the distributor has to report you to the State. (The “State” being the State Liquor Authority, aka the SLA). Not unlike in high school, you’re put on the delinquent list. And detention takes the form of COD status – Cash on Delivery.

COD status means big, busy truck drivers will stand in your store, tapping their feet, waiting for you to write a check before giving you your wine. (Or something like that…I’ve never actually given one of them a check.) And you’re not on COD status for just the one distributor. You’re on COD status for EVERYONE!

This is a very bad thing because paying for your wine the day it’s delivered is a much different situation that paying for it 30 days later (when you’ve had an entire month to sell it and get the cash to pay for it.) So nobody likes to be on COD.

But nobody wants to pay their bills before they have to. I don’t want the distributor to get my cash one day before it’s due. In some cases I don’t have it the day before it’s due, but generally, I’m just inclined to want to keep my money in the bank as long as possible.

So back to why I’m still using checks, stamps, envelopes rather than a snazzy electronic payment system.

Well, only 1 of the approximately 50 distributors I work with offers any sort of automated payment system. And it’s not really automated – I have to call the customer service line, listen to at least 5 minutes of inane music and canned liquor commercials, give them a check number, invoice number, and check amount.

But I can still use my bank’s automated payment system right? Which I started to do once I had started to build a little bit of cash in the bank. It was great – I’d just go online, set everything up and revel in no more stamps! No more envelopes! No more last minute treks to the post office because it took me 3 days to remember to take the envelopes out of my purse! Great!!!!

Not so much. Almost immediately, I started getting calls from my distributors asking where my usually timely checks were. I was about to become a delinquent!

With a little investigation, I learned that the automated payment process isn’t so automated. I was really just “automatically” asking my bank to have someone stick a check in an envelope and mail it from somewhere else. And this somewhere else was in Nebraska. And sometimes it could take up to 5 days to get the check into an envelope. And then another 5 days for the envelope to get to the distributor in New York. So 10 days total. And of course, the bank takes the money out of my account the day I process the payment, 10 days earlier.

Bottom line, I would have to pay my bills at least 10 days before their due date, hope nothing goes wrong in Nebraska (mad cow stampede?), and still could possibly wind up reported as a delinquent to every distributor in the state. And even worse – I would be a delinquent for non-payment of money that had already been removed from my account!!

I think I’ll stick to stamps.

Scooping the New York Times: Vaona Valpolicella

Originally published on May 27, 2009.

Apparently, I never actually published this. Bummer – such a waste of a good scoop! As I type, we have indeed moved into the 2008 vintage, but rest assured, it’s still good wine and well worth a try.

Follow me while we go back in time, to May, when it was still raining, just like today:

In this week’s “Wines of the Times” column, Eric Asimov and Co. chose the Vaona Valpolicella Classico as their #1 pick out of 25 different Valpolicellas.

We’ve had this wine on the Frankly Wine shelves since February, when one of our sales reps brought a bottle, winemaker in tow, for us to taste. I remember it was a cold, natsy day, but the wine was fresh and vibrant, medium-bodied, but full of flavor – berries, floral notes, minerality, It wasn’t trying to be an Amarone or anything particularly “serious.” It was just a really well-made, very enjoyable, highly drinkable wine – exactly what a Valopolicella should be.

As often seems to be the case, the article specifically mentions one vintage….just as a new one is about to arrive. As I type, we have 6 bottles of the 2007 left and the new 2008 is on a boat about to dock at a port somewhere in New Jersey. So buy the 2007 now, wait for the 2008 later, or forever hold your peace! Read more about the Vaona in the New York Times piece or in Eric Asimov’s blog, The Pour.

Back to the present….buy the 2008 right here. Price: $18.99

Taste of Tribeca Wine Tour Debrief

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I have no idea what we poured and the page where I would have posted it is long long gone. But based on that blurry early-edition iPhone picture, it looks like it was a clairette from Provence, a gelber muskateller from Austria, and a Sauvignon Blanc Semillon blend from Margaret River in Western Australia.

Originally published on May 17, 2009.

I’m fond of a good debrief. It’s a holdover from my corporate days. My last debrief followed the madness that was New Year’s Eve. This one involves the semi-madness that is the Taste of Tribeca.

For those who don’t know…and are too finger challenged to click on the link, here’s the mini-debrief on that: Taste of Tribeca is the annual fund raising event for P.S. 234 and P.S. 150, the neighborhood’s original public schools (there are more that have/are popping up, but that’s not a subject for a wine store blog.) Parent-planned, parent-run. Most of the restaurants in Tribeca (which include some of the very best restaurants in the city) set up tables along Duane Park. Customers buy tickets to sample tastes from each of those restaurants. 1 ticket = 6 tastes and you can purchase as many tickets as you like.

This year, in addition to the food, there was a Wine Tour led by wine and spirits educator Steve Olson. At the first stop, Tribeca Green Market, you tasted New York State wines. At Chambers Street, Stop #2, they poured sparkling wines. At Frankly Wines, Stop #3, we featured light white wines. At the next stop, full-bodied whites, then light reds, then full reds, then dessert wines. Or something like that.

On to the debrief part:

1. 25, maybe 30 people is about the limit of how many bodies can comfortably fit into the store. And that’s if they’re generally standing in one place drinking wine. 30 people actually trying to shop in the store, no way.

2. I can actually use the big, white wooden boxes as reconfigurable display settings, tables, a serving station. All sorts of things. Just like my architect said!

3. At an event like this, it is really hard to generate sales (people are hitting so many wine stores, it’s tough to carry bottles around with them). I knew this from last year’s tour and tried to have order forms ready, but the best approach is to have cards with the wines being poured so people can remember what they had. And to get the wines up on the web site…which I’ll do right after my debrief!

4. I can talk a person’s ear off about wine if they let me. (This is not a new learning.)

5. Given the right wine, people who “don’t like white wine” probably do, if they can just get over the fact that they “don’t like white wine.’

6. Three wines is the perfect number of a tour like this. You can choose three obviously different styles that make it easy to compare/contrast. More than three wines, it’s tough to clearly explain how they’re different. It starts to turn into an exercise in hair splitting.

7. A sign that you’ve picked the right 3 wines: there’s no obvious favorite among the crowd. Very few people will actually like all three of them. Even if they appreciate all of them and understand why all of them are well-made wines that represent where they came from, it was rare to find someone who really liked all of them. (Except me, but I’m a bit of a “wine slut”.)

8. Chilled bottles are really drippy. Next year, more cloth towels.

9. People never use the spit buckets.

10. 2/3 ice. 1/3 water. Lots of salt = very cold bottles very quickly. We tell people this all the time. Yesterday we proved it to ourselves.

What did we pour? You’ll have to go to the Frankly Wines web site to see.

Chateau La Lagune 1998: The Informercial

Originally published on May 8, 2009

For those of you that read this blog that don’t subscribe to the newsletter (could such people really exist?) I wanted to let you in on our La Lagune offer.

Mention this blog, and you’ll get 10% off any purchase of Chateau La Lagune 1998, even if it’s just 1 bottle. Buy an entire case and you’ll get 15% off (we generally offer only 10%)….if you mention this blog, or the newsletter, or the twitter feed. That sounds so infomercial-ish, but what can we say…there are so many ways to make an offer that involves a certain amount of dollars off a purchase. At least we’re not hauling in a bunch of fading pop stars for “before and after” pictures (hello Proactive!)

Now usually when I see these sorts of offers, I always wonder how many cases a retailer is sitting on. In this case, we have three cases. I thought this was all that was left in New York, period. Then yesterday, my distributor rep lets me know she’s found another 3 cases. So in total, there are 6 cases left in the New York City area which really isn’t much for a city of 8 million people.

Onto the wine on offer – Chateau La Lagune 1998 (Haut-Medoc, Bordeaux, France): It’s not inexpensive, but for a classified growth with some age on it, it’s a great value at regular price = $52.99. It may not be one of the biggest names of Bordeaux, and it may not drive master-Bordeaux critic Robert Parker wild with point-slinging desire, but among certain Bordeaux fans, La Lagune is considered to consistently play above its third growth station. (For those who are wondering what these “growths” are, check out this summary by the Wine Doctor.)

One of our sales reps introduced us to this particular vintage before heading off to Scotland to open a fancy hotel. He had tasted through all the older stock the distributor had squirreled away and told us this one was worth a purchase. We tasted it and agreed and have slowly been draining the distributor’s stock down to zero, or more specifically, draining it down to the 3 cases my new rep just dug up.

At 11 years of age, the wine still has wonderfully ripe, pure red fruit as well as the cedary, tobacco notes so typical of aged Bordeaux. It has a really lovely, silky, almost creamy texture, which combined with the lovely fruit and almost exotic spice notes, make this wine a great example of an elegant, old-school Bordeaux. Drinking beautifully right now, it doesn’t have the structure to go on forever, but you could probably eek another 5 years out of it. Maybe 10 if you like a really developed wine style. If you ‘ve ever wanted to buy a few bottles of something and see how it ages, this is a great one for that.

Intrigued? Like I wrote above, come into the store and mention this post and you’ll get your discount. I’ll go even more high tech….order on-line, mention this blog in the comments section at check out, and we’ll credit your final amount with the 10% (or 15% if you get 12 bottles) discount.

Women, Wine & The Stats Geek

Originally published on April 29, 2009.

I’m a stats geek. I can’t help it. I did really well in my college stats class and enough of it has stuck to keep me slightly armed, dangerous, and highly skeptical.

Whenever I see a study about “X% of Y group doing something” I cringe. The group doing the study is rarely sited (The 11th grade class at the school down the block isn’t quite as reputable as the New England Journal of Medicine). The sample size is rarely mentioned (“my brother, his girlfriend and her sister” isn’t quite as reliable as a 5000 person sample). Base rates are never mentioned. (For example, if there’s a 0.05% chance of something occurring, then a 300% increase means there’s now a still highly unlikely 0.15% chance of that thing occurring. This is quite a bit different than starting with a base rate of 10%…a 300% increase now means a 30% chance of that thing occurring. A 0.15% chance vs. a 30% chance? But you wouldn’t know the difference if you’re only told about the 300% increase without reference to the base rate.)

I know, I know, stats on a wine blog, no fun. but like I said, I can’t help it. Misleading usage of statistics makes me a little bit crazy.

So I was a little bit crazed at yesterday’s Vinexpo event reviewing the findings of their recent global study on women and their wine buying habits. The study surveyed about 4,000 women across the US, UK, Japan, and Europe.

In each country, they partnered with one or two publications in order to identify respondents. For example, in the US, they partnered with the Wine Spectator, so the vast majority of US respondents were Wine Spectator subscribers. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of respondents drank wine at least once a week. If your sample universe is subscribing to one of the biggest wine publications in the US, you would expect them to be drinking a fair amount of wine. Does this mean that most women in the US drink wine at least once a week? No, not at all. From this survey, you can’t say anything about the larger population because the Wine Spectator readership isn’t representative of the larger population. To try to extrapolate (fancy stats term, still can’t help it) that way is misleading.

But still, press releases are issued and the study gets picked up and the results reported as if they were applicable to the general population. As in this piece in the UK Telegraph. And this piece in Harpers Wine & Spirits. Vinexpo’s sample in the UK was drawn from Decanter and Living magazines, which may be perfectly aligned with the demographics of the broader UK population….but probably aren’t.

So you read these stories and you think you understand women’s wine buying habits. But you don’t. You understand wine buying habits of Decanter readers and Living readers….except that difference is never stated, or even alluded to. But all those numbers followed by %-signs look very official, no?

So statistically speaking, this study, to the extent that it’s meant to reveal wine buying habits among the general female population, is flawed. As a qualitative study, or even a quantitative study among a very specific population subset, it’s fine. But it’s being reported as the former, without any mention of the flaws….and that’s what drives me crazy – the annoyingly incorrect application of statistics!

I know, I can’t help it, I’m a stats geek.

Why Con Edison Loves Wine Stores

Originally published on April 26, 2009.

My new iPhone (I finally broke down and got one) says it’s 89 degrees outside. And it was 80-something yesterday. Which means the A/C went on yesterday and hasn’t been turned off yet. Looking at the weather charts, I may be able to shut it down on Tuesday night. That’s better than letting it just run until October. Eventually it will go on non-stop until, yes, October. But hopefully that won’t need to happen until mid-May.

You can see why Con Ed loves wine stores. A/C from May until October! The wine must stay happy….which keeps Con Ed happy. It is EnergyStar rated, but I’m sure it doesn’t do much for the total carbon footprint of all those wines making their way to New York. Unless you live in a cave, or Alaska, there’s not much else you can do to keep the wines cool at their end destination (although I’d be happy to hear suggestions….if they’ll keep my A/C bill down.)

What We Drank Tonight at Frankly Wines….

Originally published on April 25, 2009.

….”drank” isn’t the correct term. In the state of New York, you can’t legally drink in a wine store because the specific license only allows for the sale of wine to be consumed off the premises. This is the origin of the fancy, industry term “off-premise account” which is the opposite of an “on-premise account” where you can only sell wine to be consumed (are you ready for it….) on the premises. The non-fancy industry terms for on-premise accounts are “bar” and “restaurant”.

So no one was drinking. But there was some tasting going on, as there always is on Saturday afternoons and evenings.

Today’s selection was our newest Soave, the Il Selese from I Stefanini, a small family winery in the Veneto region of Italy. We’ve been stocking the line since Dominico Selections began importing it less than 6 months ago. When Terry first pulled it out of his bag, I had no intention of stocking it. The Soave region has a bit of a bad rap due to the many bottles of plonky, utterly forgettable wine it produces and I didn’t really expect this to be much of an exception.

Surprise! The wines were really good.

So good, I bought several cases of the Monte de Toni, the winery’s mid-priced offering. It was winter at that point, and that particular wine had a wonderful hazelnut/almond note and a rich texture that was a good match for cold winter days. It was $16.99 which is a nice price for people willing to take a chance on something a little different.

But now it’s getting warmer, so I decided to swap in the Il Selese, the winery’s entry-level offering. It’s perfect for summer with lovely, pure, juicy, almost nectarine-like fruit notes and just a touch of the nuttiness you find in the Monte de Toni. And at $12.99, it’s particularly easy to love.

So back to the tasting (not drinking!) The wine was indeed a perfect match for today’s bright, sunny weather. If you always like your wines bone crushingly dry, extremely minerally or lemon-rind citrusy, this probably isn’t the wine for you. But if you’re up for a bottle that pairs sunny, happy fruit with a little extra nutty complexity all wrapped up in a very easy-drinking package, the Il Selese is worth a try – and of course, it’s available at Frankly Wines!

Window Decorations and the Martha Stewart Principle

Originally published on April 23, 2009.

I don’t know if I made this up or if I read it somewhere (I probably read it somewhere), but the Martha Stewart Principle of decorating is that if you take some object, no matter how simple, and multiply it 10-, 20- or 100-fold, it will look much cooler, or at least much cuter. For example….

…a cupcake tower….

…or a bunch of lemons in a bowl…

….or a bucket full of puppies.

The Frankly Wine cork wall is an obvious exploitation of this principle. But it also gets put to use in our ever-changing window displays. Last summer’s display featured about 100 beach balls. This years “April Showers Bring Sping Flowers” theme features bunches of pinwheel flowers and a bowl full of cocktail umbrellas. It’s impossible to not take notice of a giant fishbowl filled with cocktail umbrellas. Look at the picture below and just TRY to disagree!