WINE: WINE BUYING MADE SIMPLE By Mark Criden Everyone I know likes wine. They like owning it, smelling it, pairing it, drinking it, and feeling it. What they don’t like is buying it. It’s just too complicated. Imagine if cheese came in a bottle. You’d stroll into Wegmans, Premier, or Globe Market entertaining a vague notion of something sharp, sweet, or creamy, something to provide the perfect snack, fondue, or collaborator with your apple pie. But instead of just grabbing a brie, muenster, or double Gloucester, you’re confronted by row after confounding row, aisle after incomprehensible aisle, of cheeses, each with a distinctive label, most in an unfamiliar language, and—worst of all—each bearing the date of its year of production. Was 2001 a good year for Stilton? It would be enough to send you screaming to the Cheez Whiz. Long ago, however, some genius figured that this is precisely the way to sell fine wine. You can just imagine the conversation: Wine Producer: “How are we going to convince the consumer to buy my product?” Marketing Guru: “We’re going to slap on a label filled with foreign-sounding terms designed to impart little, if any, information about how the wine is actually going to taste. Then, we’re going to bury it in a sea of similarly bewildering bottles and hope someone stumbles across it, buys it, likes it, and remembers enough about it to buy it again.” No wonder it’s said that the best way to end up with a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large one. Like most other endeavors, the wine industry is divided into the haves and have-nots. The haves—the industrial-scale wine producers like Gallo & Southcorp (the Australian behemoth that owns Penfolds, Lindemans, Seppelt, and Rosemount Estate, among others)—turn out tanker trucks full of correct, inoffensive wines all backed by colossal advertising budgets. You already know that if you want the vinous equivalent of Velveeta, Gallo’s Turning Leaf brand will be the ticket. But it’s largely the have-nots—smaller, artisanal producers—who produce wines with the most distinctive character and pizzazz. And it’s these producers that get lost in the ozone. So how do you sort them out? Short of shopping with a wine buff in tow, here are the three best ways to lengthen the odds of finding that bottle you’ll want to return to again and again. Know thy retailer: Sure, we turn a jaundiced eye to those who actually sell us stuff (see the sidebar, ‘Top Ten Lies of the Wine Business”) but few are more educated, and have tasted more widely, than a good wine merchant. Many local peddlers treat customers fairly, have well-developed palates, and stand behind their goods. They’ll take the time to understand your taste and do their best to offer recommendations to match. They respect the quality of what they sell; great retailers don’t stack cases of classified growth Bordeaux near the steam pipes. And they’ll usually offer discounts for quantity purchases—usually twelve bottles or more. I’ve had positive experiences at the following retailers, but this list is by no means inclusive, nor should it be read as a blanket endorsement; even Babe Ruth didn’t bat 1,000: Frontier, Hodge, and Hertel Parker in the city, Premier in Kenmore and its two offshoots in Williamsville and Orchard Park, Brighton Liquors in Tonawanda, Georgetown and Vino Aroma in Williamsville, and Global Wine and Spirits in Amherst. Know thy importer: An explosion in the ranks of small wine importers has brought hundreds of new and exciting wines into distribution in the United States. My favorite current importer is Louis/Dressner Selections, an importer of French wines out of New York. But a bottle sporting any of the following importer’s labels is as close as you can come to a guarantee of a quality wine: *Primarily French: Kermit Lynch Selections (Italian, too), Robert Chadderdon Selections, Robert Kacher Selections, Vineyard Brands, Weygandt-Metzler, Kysela Père et Fils, European Cellars (Spanish, too), Hand Picked Selections (Spanish, too), Select Vineyards (Italian, too), Wines of France (run by Alain Junguenet, a former grand prix race car driver), Jeroboam Imports (run by NYC sommelier Daniel Johnnes) *Italian: Leonard LoCascio Selections *German: Terry Theise Selections (Champagne producers, too) *Spanish: Fine Estates From Spain *Australian: The Grateful Palate, The Australian Premium Wine Collection, and Epicurean Wines Know thy shelf-talker: Shelf-talkers are the small cards on retailers’ wine racks usually indicating some impressive score a wine received. Presuming you don’t want to carry an armful of magazines, or one of Robert Parker’s anvil-sized buying guides, shelf-talkers can be a useful way of imparting buying information. But, like all media, shelf-talkers can be used deceitfully, and even when fully legitimate, not all are created equal. Rule number one: ensure the shelf-talker actually describes the wine it accompanies. Dishonest or merely negligent merchants have been known to use a card describing a different wine from the same producer, or a different vintage of the same wine, to push lesser goods. If you see the 1998 Chateau Montelena (a hot-cha wine from Napa, but in only a fair to middlin’ year), and the shelf-talker is touting the better 1999, take your business elsewhere. Second, most any wine can crow about a big score; there’s always someone handing out gold medals happy to support your marketing efforts. But the top judges of this beauty pageant are Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator. (A serious third would be the International Wine Cellar, published by Steven Tanzer. Anything else, including the ubiquitous Wine Enthusiast, is decidedly an also-ran). A plug from these guys—especially Parker—is an endorsement that someone with a gold-plated palate found this bottle delish. All of these methods provide insurance against brickbats at the table (“Hey, what do I know?”) but none actually guarantee you’re going to like what’s in the bottle. (Not everyone believes this, though. Apocryphal story: Man walks into a wine store, sips an offering at the tasting bar, and spits it out. “Jeez,” he complains, “This wine is repulsive.” “The Spectator gave it a 96,” the retailer replies. “I’ll take a case,” says the man.) What they do give you is a starting point for the most important critic of all: you. Mark Criden is the former chair of the Buffalo Branch of the International Wine & Food Society. Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top