A Wine Blog from the Files of Christy Frank
Originally published on August 28, 2009.
When wine store owners are not selling wine (or buying wine, or talking about wine) they, or maybe just I, come up with clever ideas to put on the chalkboard signs in front of their stores.
I was feeling particularly clever today. It’s the first dreary, rainy day we’ve had in, oh, a week and this just jumped into my mind.
I fully expect to see the tourists taking pictures.
Originally published on August 19, 2009.
One of the obvious pleasures of owning a wine shop is that you get to taste a lot of wines. One of the great drawbacks is that you have to find a way to keep track of all the wines you taste.
I would love to be one of those people who can taste a wine once and fix it in their mind forever more. Actually, I do have a good palate memory – I can taste a wine and remember the general sensations. But as a wine buyer, I also need to recall the producer, vintage, distributor, frontline cost, deal structure, order minimum, and split case fees associated with every wine I taste. Or at least every wine I might possibly want to buy for the store. Which given that I have very good sales reps, is a good deal of the wines I taste. So I need a system.
Some people just type their notes directly into an electronic device of choice – an iPhone, a Blackberry, a computer. But this doesn’t work for me. As quickly as I can type (and I can type very quickly) there’s a disconnect between my palate and my keyboard. The tasting notes just don’t flow as well when there’s a power cord involved. (And there’s always the danger of dribbling on the key board.)
Some people may rely on the spec sheets provided by the sales reps. These are useful if I want to check how a producer or region is spelled without squinting at a wine-stained label. But they don’t take the place of my own notes. And most damanging to this potential system, at least in my view: it would require 3-ring binders to keep track of everything. I hate 3-ring binders and 3-ring hole punches and those little sitcky reinforcement circles.
So I’ve turned to taking notes in a series of ruled Cahier Moleskine notebooks. Yes, these little books are now seen in the hands of hipsters everywhere, but hipster coolness factor aside, they work. They’re light, they can be thrown in any size bag or purse, and they have a handy pocket in the back. This pocket is important because occassionally I can’t find my current notebook and have to scribble tasting notes on Post-its or little scraps of paper. These stray notes can then be piled on the counter and later, tucked into that handy back pocket.
The only problem with this system….I’m now on my 12th book. And while flipping through 12 notebooks filled with tasting memories may seem like a wonderful way to spend an afternoon (oh, I remember that lovely Frappato, all roses and violets and fresh spring berries), it’s not terribly productive when you’re desperately trying to find the distributor for a specific wine you had back in May, or was it April? (Actually, it was January.)
So I am now in the process of cataloging my tasting notes on my computer so I can use the brute force of a spreadsheet program to sort through 12 books of tasting notes. It would be mind-numbing, except that it is quite nice to reflect on all the wine I’ve tasted over the last year and a half. Yes, it would be quicker if I could just do this the first time through, but like I said, it just doesn’t work that way for me.
And anyhow, those Moleskine notebooks are really, really cute,
Originally published on August 10, 2009.
There’s a certain science to retail. There’s a book called Why We Buy by the fabulously named Paco Underhill that goes into much of this science. Things like the “butt brush factor”. Or where to place shopping baskets. Or that most people turn right when they enter a store. A lot of it doesn’t apply to a shop like mine, which is so tiny that if you turn right, and you’ll hit a wall. But it’s still a great read.
But I don’t think it addresses one of the great mysteries of my wine shop…possibly any wine shop. The mystery is below, but first, a bit of minutia on how my shop is stocked.
The bottles are lined up on the shelves, standing up, one behind the other, like in the picture below. Yes, I can hear the wine geeks shuddering – “But isn’t bad for bottles to stand upright?” In the middle- to long-term, yes, but these bottles sell quickly. They’re not upright long enough for the corks to dry out…and half of them are screw caps anyway. And those that don’t move so quickly, we only keep one on the shelf and every week replace it with one that’s been on its side. So stop shuddering…I take very good care of my wine!
Now, on to the mystery…
A wine can sell like hotcakes, literally fly off the shelves. But when there’s one bottle left, with no mates behind it, it suddenly just sits there. And sits. And sits. And sits. It sits there until one of three things happen:
Now it’s no great surprise why a single bottle on the bargain shelf moves. People like bargains. And they really like big, red slashes.
But what I don’t understand is why a single bottle in the general shelf population won’t sell. Or perhaps oddly, why it does sell if you just put non-matching bottles behind it. Why are customers so wary of a little empty space?
Originally published on July 11, 2009.
It’s a very rare day that we complain about our customers. After all, without customers, Frankly Wines would just be a very expensive wine closet. But occasionally, a customer walks in that just rubs us the wrong way.
Now I can hear you out there, thinking “those wine snobs, making fun of poor, unsuspecting customers that come in and ask innocently silly questions. That’s why wine has such a bad rap as an elitist’s drink. That’s why I just stick to beer!”
Now I can’t speak for other stores, but at Frankly Wines, we like to talk about wine. What you may think of as a silly question, we think of as an opportunity to talk about wine. And it’s a very rare customer who can annoy us by talking about wine.
No, the rubbing the wrong way usually has very little to do with the specifics of wine retail. That Customer would likely annoy anyone working in any retail establishment, regardless of what they’re selling. That Customer would likely annoy anyone, period.
You really don’t want to be That Customer. It’s just not polite.With that background in place, the Frankly Wines blog will kick off a recurring feature about That Customer. It will do nothing to increase your wine knowledge or increase our sales. But it could help make the world a kinder, better place.
Here we go:
That Customer #1Customer #1 walks into the store. It’s a small store and there’s only one person manning (or in this case, wommaing) the shop. I greet the customer, asks if he needs any help. He doesn’t. The phone rings. It’s a customer checking on a delivery for later that afternoon. Our conversation takes less than a minute during which the word “delivery” is probably stated 10 times.
During this less-than-a-minute conversation, That Customer comes to the counter to ask a question. I try to give the universal “be right with you” sign, which he doesn’t notice. He doesn’t really seem to notice I’m on the phone. Clearly talking to another customer about a delivery. Not talking to my mother. Not talking to a friend. Not yapping away for an extended period of time, like, oh, more than 45 seconds. Not talking on a phantom blue tooth ear piece in which case I could just be crazy and not actually, clearly, obviously talking on the phone about a delivery.
Nope, he asks his question loudly. Then asks it again. Loudly. Sort of like my 5 year-old, who is, well, 5 years old. I smile, wrap up the last 5 seconds of my delivery conversation and answer his question, smiling, smiling, smiling.
Now I get it. It’s annoying if you’re in a store being ignored while the person behind the counter yaps away on the phone. But there’s perhaps a shade of difference between that situation and someone who greets you, asks if you need any help, and then has to take a 45-second phone call from another customer with a question.
Most customers notice the difference. Most customers have the patience to wait out a quick phone call. That Customer, not so much.
Please, don’t be That Customer.
Originally published on July 11, 2009.
I love Post-it Notes.
It’s a habit acquired in my corporate years, when I had extremely easy access to free office supplies. The supply closet was stocked with an endless array of Post-it Notes: big ones, little ones, pop-up versions, multicolored cubes, yellow ones, neon ones, pastel ones, lined or unlined. In theory, I could have used a different style of note for every mood or presentation format….but I really wasn’t that organized.
When I opened the store, I tried to replicate this Post-it Note extravaganza. But this is one of the shockers of running your own business.
Post-it Notes cost money. A LOT of money! But you need them. You really, really do.
It doesn’t work to use whatever’s just laying around. Like scotch tap and merchandising bags. For one thing, you can never find the scotch tape when you need it. And perhaps more importantly, merchandising bags are first a foremost, merchandising bags. They look like bags, and act like bags, and in a rush, you wind up bagging a bottle of wine with your phone messages, or delivery address, or daily stocking list. This may add a charming bit of authenticity to your packaging, but it’s not so funny when you have no idea where you’re supposed to deliver those two cases of wine because the address just left the store wrapped around a bottle of Pinot Gris. Hypothetically.
At Frankly Wines, we use the Post-it 4″ x 6″ Line-Ruled Ultra Colors Notes. (That’s the official name. And the size and color matter because they’re big enough and bright enough to stand out from the usual counter clutter.) They cost $10.29/3-pack at Staples. We go through one pad a week, which works out to about $200/year including New York sales tax. For POST-IT NOTES!!!
I’m considering switching to Staples Stickies 4″ x 6″ Line-Ruled Recycled Yellow Notes. At $11.99/pack, I could whittle my annual sticky-paper outlay to $135. But the notes are really more white than yellow, which means they’ll just disappear among the clutter. So they’re nearly as useless as the merchandising bag approach.
So looks like we’ll be sticking to Post-it Notes for now. But I’m certainly not above accepting donations from those who still work in places where Post-it Notes roam free. Hypothetically.
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!
Originally published on June 28, 2009.
I have always wanted to do a post on the top Google searches that find my web site, either the Frankly Wines store site or this blog. I think Terry over at Mondosapore did a post on this a long time ago, but as it says in the title, I’m lazy (at least right this moment) and don’t feel like looking it up. And just the other day, Lyle Fass at Rockss and Fruit posted his site’s Top 10 oddest search words, so I decided to just be a lazy copy cat and finally do my own post.
Sadly, it’s not very exciting. There are lots of search terms on wooden boxes due to my apparently highly popular post on the phases of wooden box lust, respect, and contempt.
There’s a search on “stats geek – why?” which seems like an odd question to ask. Really, why not? Or who cares? Or, huh?
The only slightly interesting, truly odd search is “promiscuous wine”. That one speaks for itself.
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.
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.
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.)