Wine Maker has it right: Make sure you read the last Paragraph

I just saw this news story on the NYT website and it sort of made me feel better about wine makers. So often do we forget that wine makers are grueling, working year round, night-and-day to deliver us such an awesome glass of wine. Credits always go to the critics or distributors or that LWS that finds the wine, but how often do you really think about how the wine maker feels?
Please read on to discover a wine maker who was strongly disappointed when he found out how much his wine was being sold for! Make sure you read the last paragraph!

Cheers!
-Tatum

A Winemaker Sees Red
By Nick Fox


Not long after my recent column on Paso Robles zinfandels I got a phone call from Ehren Jordan, the winemaker for Turley Wine Cellars. A phone call from Ehren is always a pleasant prospect, as he is one of the more insightful and articulate winemakers around. But this time he was indignant.


The problem was not what I had said about his wine, which precedes the usual indignant winemaker communique. In fact, I had really liked the 2006 Turley Dusi Ranch zin, and had said so in print. No, the problem was the fact that we had said the bottle cost $115. As with all wine panel tastings, our coordinator, Bernard Kirsch, buys the bottles through retail sources, and $115 was the price of the wine at Morrell & Company, a high-end New York retailer in Rockefeller Center. Really high-end, in Ehren’s view.

You see, Turley wholesales the bottle for around $20 and the suggested retail is $40 or so. Now, Ehren is not naïve about how the wine market works. He understands that Turley zinfandels, especially the single vineyard wines, are in high demand. This means that retailers must often look beyond the distributors to obtain bottles, and the extra transactions along the way drive the price of the wine up. A lot of highly sought-after wines flow through this so-called gray market. Nonetheless, he didn’t like it.

“We pride ourselves on the fact that we try to sell wines reasonably,’’ Ehren said. “When I see it for $115, I think, that’s not what we intended. I don’t buy $115 bottles of wine. And the other side of it is, somebody just made a lot more money than we did, and we put all the time and energy into it.’’

I spoke with Nikos Antonakeas, the managing director at Morrell, to hear his explanation of the pricing.
“It’s very simple,’’ he told me. “I bought it from a customer who is on the mailing list who sold it to me for $85. There was nothing else out there, and our customers demand it.’’

Typically, Nikos said, Morrell would get an allocation of two mixed cases — 24 bottles — of Turley’s single-vineyard zinfandels through Turley’s New York distributor, Michael Skurnik Wines.
He said those bottles were sold at Morrell’s usual retail markup, which would mean about $45. Not surprisingly, those few bottles sell out very quickly.

“Unfortunately, we have 240 requests,’’ he said. “So I go to auctions, and private individuals. Some are on the mailing list and they just want to make a buck, and sometimes we say yes if we know the customer.’’
Demand drives the market, and for wines made in minute quantities the demand is overwhelming, and people for whom money is of little object are willing to pay a lot. It’s why a single bottle of 2005 Screaming Eagle can be found in a New York retail shop selling for $2,500, and why a bottle of Krug Clos d’Ambonnay is selling for $4,500. (By the way, if you think $4,500 is too much for a bottle of Champagne, you’ll be relieved to know I found it at another store for $1,000 less, which in fact was its suggested retail price.)

In that context maybe $115 is not too much to pay for a bottle of $40 zinfandel. On the other hand, maybe it is. After all, as Ehren pointed out, somebody’s making a lot of money, and it usually is not the producer.

“I know wineries that have raised their prices when they see stuff like that, and I wonder whether we should be making that money, but we just don’t want to go there,’’ Ehren said. “I think it also engenders the feeling that Turley is really expensive, and it’s really not true. Then they show up at the winery and it’s just a bunch of guys making wine, nothing fancy. That’s who we are.’’

He said the idea that people are buying his wine as an investment pained him.
“Investment? We make the wine to drink,’’ he said. “It’s zinfandel, just drink it!’’