As the process to go through at least 56 wines bought at Trader Joe’s continues I’m getting increasingly more impressed with their buying prowess while being equally confused as to how these low prices work for the wineries or distributors selling them.
Another case in point occurred earlier this week when I opened a Capolan Merlot. In a simple web search (which I try to do for each wine to get a bit more info), the same wine is selling from a low of $9.24 to a high of $13.95.
At TJ’s it’s $3.99.
Now I’ve hypothesized that some of this may have to do with sheer volume, say “Wine Shop” buying three cases and paying $6.00/bottle and The Joe buying a thousand cases and paying $1.25/bottle but the numbers don’t make much sense to me from the winery perspective.
In digging a little deeper I found their total case production numbers at anywhere between “2000″ or “7000″ cases. So further crunching the math (which I’m terrible at BTW) even if the wine costs as little as $1.00/bottle to produce (very cheap) I don’t see how marking it up so minimally to TJ’s makes much sense in the overall bottom line department.
For me, less than 10,000 cases is still considered small, not microscopically so (we produce wines in the 300-500 case range – that’s small) so I’m not sure how success can be defined at that level with any of these price points.
None of this factors in to what I thought about the wine mind you, but the whole Trader Joe’s price issue has been on the brain of late…
The wine itself is nothing special. I got chocolate on the nose, but not like Belgian or Hershey. What I experienced after a few extra sniffs was something I can only describe as hot cocoa powder, something you’d add hot water too, throw in a thermos and go watch a live football game with. Not sure it’s what you’re looking for in wine though…
It was tannic and somewhat fruity. As has been the case with a few of these wines, not bad but not anywhere near special either. In fairness I gave it an extra day and it did come around somewhat. The fruit was there and the finish was mild if a bit dry.
For the sake of versimilatude lets just call this a bad hop off the second baseman’s glove that could have been called an error but was scored a SINGLE.
I often wonder about that same thing on the Trader Joe’s pricing side. I think I have landed on they are usually trying to liquidate inventory. That suspicion was confirmed recently with this Handley Cellars Sauvignon Blanc. The ’07 was on their site for $15 and I found the ’06 at Trader Joe’s for $6. I contacted the winery and they confirmed they were just trying to move it.