Ok, just for fun to start this off: retailers, what is the vaguest wine request you’ve ever been asked to fill?
I had a guy come in here the other day and ask for “I had this California wine a few years ago…it was a mix of two grapes and the name sounded Spanish…do you have that?”
I am guilty of this. When I was about 22 yrs old, I had dinner at one of the Chez Melange restaurants in the South Bay. I was not a wine drinker yet, but my date ordered a bottle of Merlot that was so smooth, fruity, and innocuous that I loved it. I couldn’t decipher the label, so I went into Bristol Farms, looked through the Merlot section, and scratched my head. Then I asked the wine steward for the “Merlot that comes in the smoky gray glass bottle, instead of these greenish glass ones”.
Along these lines I was in our local wine shop the other day browsing for interesting white wines when a woman comes in and says, I had a really good wine from Santa Barbara County the other day. do you have it?
Very patient salesperson says, well they make a lot of wine in SB Cty, do you remember the name of the producer or even the type of wine it was?
She says it was red. He asks if it was a Pinot Noir or Syrah…she says maybe a Cabernet…he says, well they aren’t really known for their Cabs but let me show you the Pinots and Syrah we have from SB and see if you recognize the label.
She looks, doesn’t recognize any and wisely decides to go home and ask whoever poured the wine for her what on earth it was.
For non wine geeks, it’s almost like there is one big producer for each region…just like the questions my fiancee Traci gets at Southwest Airlines…“my friend’s daughter works for “The Airlines”, do you know her?” As if “the airlines” are one big secretive company…and everyone should know everyone else at Airline Inc.