The Burden of Greatness

Wine shops all across the country have begun receiving calls from wine lovers seeking to buy 1990 Grange, a deeply complex, powerfully built and as-yet unreleased red wine from Penfolds of Australia.

Past vintages of Grange have sold for about $85 a bottle, but the greatness of the 1990 vintage is well known and has pushed demand from heavy to frantic. At this pace, the current price won’t hold for long; and most buyers will be lucky to get one bottle.

Sounds like a happy situation for the winemaker, the importer, the wholesaler and the wine shop owner, right? Oddly, for everyone concerned it’s equivalent to Excedrin Headache No. 283.

Even though sales of limited-release wines bring in huge profits for all sectors of the wine market, dealing with high demand creates problems, and not just for people in the business. Consumers eager for the wine fret over not getting as much as they’d like.

*

“All it does is get more people mad at us,” says Justin Meyer, referring to the distribution of “Bonny’s Vineyard,” the limited-production Cabernet Sauvignon made by his Silver Oak Cellars.

Meyer, who has made a tiny amount of the single-vineyard Cabernet for the last 15 years, says he is tired of dealing with the headaches of marketing such a wine and will quit making it, even though it fetches $50 a bottle and sells out within hours of its release.

He has made the “Bonny’s Vineyard” Cabernet, named for his wife, since 1979. Every year it gets rave reviews and puts a spotlight on Silver Oak that other wineries envy. Instead of being happy about this situation, though, Meyer hates the problems associated with the distribution of the wine.

“You can’t please anyone,” he says. “If a shop owner gets two cases, he wants three. If he gets three, he wants four.”

Wholesale companies have a similar problem. One wholesale executive says: “If it weren’t for the money, we’d never carry any of this stuff.”

*

This week, Napa Valley winemaker Chuck Wagner began shipment of his Caymus Vineyards’ latest wine, the 1991 Cabernet Sauvignon “Special Selection.” Last year’s release price of this wine (the 1990 vintage) was $75 a bottle. Wagner says this year’s release will be $100 per bottle--the first widely distributed California wine with a three-digit price.

(Diamond Creek Vineyards in the Napa Valley made a Cabernet from its tiny Lake Vineyard in 1993 that it sold for $150 a bottle, and Williams and Selyem Winery in Sonoma sold a small amount of a special Pinot Noir at $100 per bottle last year, but the Caymus wine is the first widely available wine for more than $100 a bottle.)

The higher price should slow demand a bit, says Wagner. “But even with the high price,” he says, “we’re still going to have people with short allocations mad at us.” He declines to say how many cases of the Special Selection wine were made in 1991, but industry sources estimate that production exceeds 4,000 cases. Caymus uses fruit from its 40-acre vineyard just north of the winery.

Wagner says demand for the Special Selection Cabernet grew out of publicity of its greatness, including a ranking as the best wine in the world in 1994 by Wine Spectator, a consumer wine magazine.

*

Wine companies have long used high pricing to slow down the sale of a wine in demand. A case in point is Chateau Petrus, the acclaimed Bordeaux from Pomerol, which harvests Merlot grapes from 27 acres, makes about 4,000 cases of wine and has been a target of wine collectors since the early 1970s. In the last two decades, the price of Petrus has risen rapidly from that of just another top Bordeaux in the 1970s to one of the most expensive wines in the world.

This price increase was put in effect in part to spread the wine out to more buyers, and it appears to have worked. “No one buys cases of Petrus any more; they buy bottles,” says David Breitstein of the Duke of Bourbon in Canoga Park. “I never have enough (Petrus) when the new one is released. It’s always in strong demand. We only got a couple of cases, and even at $399 a bottle, I had to allocate the bottles.”

After the initial sale of a Petrus, the price rises. Last week, a West Coast wine retailer listed the 1990 wine at $5,399 per case, or $449.92 per bottle.

Meyer of Silver Oak says raising the price of his “Bonny’s Vineyard” Cabernet to slow down sales wouldn’t solve the problem of who gets it. And his problems are worse than Caymus’ and Petrus’, because Bonny’s Vineyard itself, adjacent to his winery in the Napa Valley, is only four acres in size and never produces more than 800 cases of wine--usually less.

Silver Oak makes 32,000 cases of Cabernet from its vineyards in Alexander Valley, That wine sells for $32 a bottle. Another 6,000 cases of a Napa Valley-designated Silver Oak wine retails for $36. Meyer must sell all this wine, and that means allocating “Bonny’s Vineyard” carefully.

*

For instance, wine shops or restaurants that sell a lot of the Alexander Valley Cabernet expect to get a larger allocation of the Bonny’s Vineyard wine. Meyer likes to promote the sale of his wines at places that don’t discount it, and he wants to reward those who treat the wine with respect--such as restaurants that use high-quality stemware.

So, Meyer decided to solve the problem by simply stopping production of the wine. Besides, he says, the intensity of the grapes from that wine will be a nice addition to his Napa Valley wine, giving it more depth and flavor.

Wine of the Week

1993 Straccali Chianti ($6)-- This wine is a perfect example of what Chianti is today: fresh, clean, light, quaffable and very user-friendly. It exhibits wonderful cherry, tea and rose petal characteristics, a light floral note and a marvelous fruity texture on the tongue. It is not listed as being from the Classico region of Tuscany, but the producer is the respected house of Rocca delle Macie, based in the hilly, Classico-region town of Castellina. Rocca delle Macie is the third largest producer of Chianti (after Antinori and Ruffino). Under its primary name, Rocca delle Macie makes some excellent Chianti Classicos. This wine, perfect for pasta, may well be discounted to below $5, a stunning red wine bargain.