I read the WS Insider and often go with their “value of the week” pick. Many have been very good, like the 16 Volpaia CC reserva and the 17 Colene Clemmons Margo. Last
week they highlighted 2017 Merum Priorati Desti. They said 1600 cases imported. So I went looking for it on wine-searcher.com (Pro, of course) and couldn’t find a trace. Not “sold out” or “we can’t ship to Ohio,” just none for sale in the US. Probably the WS jumped the gun and it just hasn’t come across the pond yet, but it made me wonder. If you can’t find a wine on wine-searcher.com, is there any other way to find it (other than standard google search)? I tried googling and got nothing useful.
There must be many wine stores and other kinds of stores that sell wine, which do not have their inventory listed on Wine-Searcher.
But especially for wine geek type wines, if WSPro doesn’t find them, and you also can’t find them via Google, I think it’s pretty unlikely you’ll find them elsewhere. That Priorat isn’t going to be on supermarket shelves but not in any wine stores which show up on WSPro.
My guess is those wines just haven’t arrived in the USA yet. The favorable notes from Wine Spectator should increase the odds they make it over here and do so sooner, I would think.
Find the distributor and ask them
Wine-searcher is definitely the industry standard tool for finding retailers that carry a wine. I’m not aware of any other search tool that’s as powerful as WS.
There are times though where there one or more factors lead to you not finding a particular wine. It may be a very small volume wine and as such WS just has an issue finding a match. Sometimes WS just has issues matching a wine to results. Or maybe retailers that carry a wine might not list their inventories on WS. There’s a host of reasons why you might have a hard time locating a wine.
If you’re having an issue finding a wine, there are a few ways that you can try locating a retailer that sells it. The primary one being finding the importer/distributor of the wine and contacting them. They can either let you know which retailers carry that wine, or alternatively make arrangements for a retailer close to you to obtains a few bottles so you can purchase it there.
Boots-on-the-ground always works best! Sometimes a wine just won’t show up on WS and you need to do some detective work.
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A very good point. The only thing that comes up on a google search are links to wine-searcher.com, the actual winery and an outfit called Boutinot in Florida. I think this is the distributor, but the website is terrible The “contact us” link doesn’t work. I e-mailed Merum in Spain to see if they could help.
Yea thats how I found Goodfellow in my market. I reached out to the distributor and he pointed me in the right direction
- Nothing better than wine-searcher in finding what’s currently for sale, but for stuff just coming in and which may be prone to selling quickly, find retailer email blasts to subscribe to.
- I assume everyone else was thinking this too and was too polite to say it but you’ll do way better taking wine recs from this board than from WS Insider.
I reached out to the winery (Merum, in Spain) and their answer was an offer to sell to me directly. They said 98 euros to ship 6 bottles. That almost doubles the price making it no longer “value of the week.” What they didn’t say is “X is our American distributor” or " you can buy our wines at y" That implies that they don’t have distribution in the US.
And…I appreciate that there are often good suggestions raised by Berserkers. I read “Wine Talk” almost every day. But I’ve been happy with many of the WS Insider picks.
Usually I end up agreeing that the section is a good value and the timing is such that I can find the wine before it sells out (with this one exception).
Legal question then: does that make you the importer or does it still have to go through some other middleman to get tariffs and such? I’ve seen some French wine offers from wineries I like but it seemed like importing them would be problematic (and not necessarily cheaper as you indicated).
A good point. When I have visited wineries in Italy and Spain, a few have said that they have wine already positioned in the US. I bought wine from a winery in Chianti in 2018. The wine was shipped from a warehouse in the US. It would seem that they have imported their wine without a distributor. Fine by me, but I wonder if this is really kosher.