we can’t tell you where the grapes for this wine come from / who made it, but we’ll make you think it’s the same as a very prestigious wine.
2 Likes
I think this is the real challenge. The more everyone sees 95 everywhere else, the harder it is for any given retailer to give more “honest” feedback about a wine. I generally laugh it off and walk the other way when I see 97pts from some reviewer I feel is untrustworthy, but although I may not be the exception on this forum, I certainly am at the retailer.
At a rather more serious level, rather too many fraudulent ‘wine investment schemes’. Jim Budd’s (investdrinks blog / Winefraud website) always made for very sobering reading, given the amount of scams operating.
1 Like
This is a prior post of mine about Costco. I haven’t noticed them being as aggressive about doing this in recent years, but also there haven’t been that many really bad vintages anywhere in recent years either.
+++++++++
Talking just in terms of honesty and fair dealing, and not about the legality of it, the dividing line for me is whether the shop is cherry picking good vintages, or whether either (a) they are showing you ratings over several vintages for you to see them or (b) they just can’t keep up with changing shelf talkers for new vintages all the time.
Over many years, I’ve tended to think Costco is in the former category. Say you have a 2002 CdP on the shelves that got the following scores:
1999 WA 95
2000 WA 90
2001 WA 94
2002 WA 82
1999 WS 92
2000 WS 92
2001 WS 93
2002 WS 84
And the shelf talker for the 2002s reads:
1999 WA 95
2000 WS 92
2001 WA 94
While the information is literally correct, it’s a deliberate attempt to make you think this wine from the washout 2002 vintage is a low to mid 90s caliber wine. I personally consider that to be misleading and unethical (if not necessarily something that should be legally actionable).
On the other hand, if they’ve just put the 2014 Prisoner on the shelf and the 2013 shelf talker is still there, or the 2014 is on the shelf, the score isn’t out yet, but they have the last three years of scores on there, I don’t think there is anything much to that. That isn’t an intent to deceive anyone.
1 Like
The Petrus of New Hampshire
2 Likes
There is a store near where I work that doesn’t put a price tag on the bottle. The price is noted in the bins where the bottles are stored. I’ve caught them numerous times with bottles that ring up higher than the price noted in the bin. They have always corrected it when I pointed it out but it’s happened enough that I wonder if it’s not a mistake and how many people don’t notice and can’t compare with the bottles later. I’ve also stopped shopping there due to this problem.
2 Likes
Constantly find mispriced items in my local grocery store. No doubt most people aren’t paying attention
1 Like
That does not sound like a ‘deceptive business practice’ ; sounds like it has crossed over into outright fraud.
Start a separate thread and out them.
1 Like
That is exactly the type of stuff I am talking about though, stuff that is legal, but really a statement that the retailer doesn’t care about the customer. If a law changed for this, they would do something else. In this case, I think their intent is more important than the specifics, but these specifics often show their intent.
Some retailers, mainly online “flash sales” site, will try to make you think that you are buying a wine at a great discount (40% off, compare at $xx, etc) while in reality:
a) It only takes a quick wine-searcher pro query to figure out that the price offered is pretty much the same as everywhere else
or
b) They are the only ones offering that particular wine, so you really don’t have a way to check if the discount they claim is such.
4 Likes
If the email is from Garagiste, your spider sense should be tingling.
1 Like
For a while there maybe 10-15 years ago, there were several retailers (all from New Jersey in my recollection) that put very low prices out for search engines to pick up, but they inevitably didn’t have those wines at those prices, and after you would order them on their website, someone would contact you and say “Oh, we are all out of that $50 2005 Bordeaux, but we have that producer’s 2007 for $55, can we substitute that for you?”
It was a weird model, and I wonder how many people would fall for it. I haven’t seen that in awhile, though, or maybe Wine Searcher has cleaned those out over time.
1 Like
There is a local retailer near me that does this. Great shop, great wines, love the place. But they’re bad about touting wines that all have a 90+ score and rating, then when you read who gave them this rating, it was the store.
1 Like
Taking the high-end of a barrel range and posting it as the “score”. So a 93-95 pt wine becomes 95 pts.
3 Likes
My guess would be an individual employee. The higher-ups simply don’t believe you and think you are trying to scam them. Especially vulnerable to that are binary thinkers. They make an absolute decision (wild assumption) right away about what happened, and that’s that. No amount of evidence you present will change their mind. They’ll view subsequent instances of the same thing happening the same way (ie. some new scam the kids are pulling). If you do, somehow, manage to break through their armor and prove to them something they believed as absolute fact was incorrect, they will heavily resent you for it.
Amazon does this with almost every product these days. Search for anything and it’ll show you a “crossed out” price, then the “Amazon price”, followed by your percentage savings (i.e. 38% off). But if you just Google the product, it’s clear that the Amazon price is often exactly the same as the price at all major retailers (Walmart, Best Buy, etc.)…
2 Likes
Most of what is being described here I consider marketing fluff and not deceptive or particularly insidious. More underhanded to me are the wine clubs that tout their “unique” or “exclusive” wines, which are really just private label junk.
2 Likes
That was a huge problem early on with W-S, then reappeared briefly some years later. They don’t and can’t tolerate it because it renders their service useless.
It makes no sense, anyway. People use W-S to look for very specific wines. I can’t imagine such a crude bait-and-switch working with wine geeks. It just wastes peoples’ time and pisses them off.
2 Likes
To be fair to wineries, they sometimes can’t control how their wines are priced in the retail channels. There are times when it’s cheaper by retail than from the winery as a result. That doesn’t make it any less annoying, though.
1 Like
Lyle Fass once sold me a wine that had “ridiculously sick fruit” and the fruit was merely sick. This was in 2013 and I’ll never forget it.
2 Likes