Anyone who uses wine searcher with any regularity is probably aware of 2 or 3 retailers that consistently show up at the end of the search, and always with prices that are dramaticly higher than the rest of the sellers. This is not a criticism of these retailers but rather an inquiry as to who it is that buys at these inflated prices. Also, if private collectors were to sell to these businesses, should the seller expect to receive higher prices for their wine?
I speculate that those stores arenāt that focused on customers like us.
In DC, where stores like Bassinās MacArthur and Calvert Woodley have consistently competitive prices, sometimes even best-in-the-nation prices, there are stores like DCanter and Grand Cata that will sell wines at 120%-150%+ market prices because they are cute and ācuratedā and at trendy locations frequented by people who need wine for right now or who impulse shop adorable producer stories and who donāt even know Wine Searcher exists. If I mention I like wine to non-winos, I will almost invariably be asked if Iāve been to them or told that I MUST go to one or the other.
I have been physically in both and in the competitively priced ones and my anecdotal conclusion is this:
If you walk into a wine store and you can see the color of the walls behind the bottles, youāre in an overpriced location. And the more wall you can see and the nicer the color, the more overpriced it is. The same goes for walking space in the store.
Thatās not to say more tightly packed stores arenāt overpriced (Total Wine is a minefield) but thatās another story.
I have no idea what the Wine Searcher bottom dwellers look like or where theyāre located. The stores I just mentioned donāt even bother to list their prices on Wine Searcher.
Thereās something to be said about stores that can source a varied manner of sought after wines for their clients. I imagine thatās a big part of the markup, being able to not only source rare wines, but doing so in larger quantities rather than competitively pricing bottles and allocation just 1-2 per person.
A few of those places are incredibly useful resources for hard to find wines. In general, they are posting lists from overseas sources, and offering to bring the wines in for you. Thatās reflected in the cost. Sometimes, if you really want a wine and arenāt price sensitive, they are the only possible way to get a given wine short of buying, storing overseas and importing yourself.
Just to clarify, because maybe I misunderstood, and with all due respect, any offering at the bottom of the list should, by definition, not be hard to find, because thereās an entire list of cheaper alternative retailers for the same wine. Hence the list. Right?
Of course. But so what? They just post the whole inventory from sources from which the wines are available. If you look at the inventory from some large UK merchants you will see the same inventory roughly. So they arenāt picking and choosing. You can decide whatās worth paying for.
I took Michealās question to mean the bottom of the wine-searcher results list i.e. the most expensively priced bottles of a particular wine thatās captured by wine-searcher. Weāre talking about the retailers that consistently price many of their wines well above the āaverageā that other retailer have it for
I donāt think wine is a pure commodity market even when youāre dealing with what would seem to be the āsameā wine. People have different levels of trust in their retailer in terms of storage, provenance, etc., the wine market is geographically segmented because not everyone can order over the internet or is comfortable doing so, and some buyers are probably pretty price insensitive (see, the phenomenon of bottles selling for more at auction than they are available for at retail).
Some sellers take advantage of that by setting their prices high and hoping for the best.
The two or three main sellers are pulling a feed off Liv-Ex.
I think it is important to have a little care about you offer/sell rather than just posting five thousand wines owned by someone else on Wine-Searcher.