You’d Better Shop Around

If you pay full price for a bottle of wine, you may be getting ripped off. Almost every widely available bottle of wine can be found at substantially less than its suggested retail price.

There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that wineries often post artificially high sticker prices in the hope of suggesting high quality, knowing that most stores will discount the wines 10% to 20%.

The 1988 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet Sauvignon, for instance, has a worldwide reputation as a high-quality wine and a suggested price of $18. Yet the winery would never be able to sell all of its stock at this price--not with so many wines of near-comparable quality selling at $15 and $13. (Mondavi declines to state how much Napa Valley Cabernet it makes, but the amount is estimated to be about 100,000 cases annually.)

The non-discount retail price of wine typically includes a 50% markup; for instance, when a bottle retails for $18, that would mean the shop owner paid a wholesale price of $12 and tacked on $6 to establish the retail price. But high-volume stores will sell the same wine for less than $18, relying on higher sales for their profits. In fact, the markup at high-volume stores is usually only 12%, reducing the retail price of that $18 bottle to $13.44.

But Mondavi and its wholesalers also allow discounts to shops when they buy in volume--there is often a 5% discount for buying five cases on a single order, a 10% discount for 10 cases. A wine shop in Southern California that agreed to buy 25 cases of the wine during a special one-month promotion might earn huge discounts. They would then be able to offer the same 1988 Mondavi Cabernet for $11.99--a penny less than a non-discount store pays for the wine. In fact, the wine is currently selling for that price in some Southern California shops.

In the last few years, however, even fine wine shops, which deal in much smaller volume, have started discounting. It’s not unusual to see a $15 bottle marked $12.99--a 30% markup as opposed to the traditional 50%.

Sometimes the suggested price of the wine is reasonable for its quality, yet wholesalers and discount shops, in their zeal to offer a bargain to consumers, drop the price so low it makes the wine look as if there’s something wrong with it.

A case in point: 1990 Silverado Vineyards Chardonnay, which is a very good wine for $14.50. Based on its quality, it probably could sell for $17. But one wine shop in Southern California offers the wine for $9.49.

To counter this, some wines are sold with conditions attached--agreements that wines won’t be sold below a certain price. The suggested price for a bottle of 1989 Caymus Cabernet (a superb wine, by the way) is $18. At least one wine shop in Southern California has that wine on its shelf for $13.99, “and we could sell it for less, but (the winery) asked us to sell it at no less than $13.99,” says the merchant.

Another “non-discounted” wine is 1990 Sonoma-Cutrer “Russian River Ranches” Chardonnay, which is supposed to sell for $14 but which I have seen at $10.99. “We’ve been asked by the winery not to put that price in our newsletter,” says the merchant.

The key to getting the best price for a bottle of wine? Know what you want and then call around and ask who has the best price. Sometimes the savings are substantial.

Wine of the Week

1991 Firestone Vineyards Gewurztraminer ($8) --This is one of the best wines Firestone has ever made. It’s amazingly floral, with hints of rose petal and pear. In the Alsatian style, it is almost totally dry but has so much fruit that it comes across as a trace sweet. In 1991 the grapes were harvested two weeks later than usual, giving them ample opportunity to pick up additional flavor. Worth searching for.