The Ill-Served Wine Buying Plebs 3: Retail Sources of Help and Advice?

 

Part 3.  Shelf-Talkers:  Promises and Pitfalls

[In Part One of this series, I described the thirty-some-year period between the beginnings, in the 1970s, of the wine boom and the early 2000s as a kind of golden age of helpful advice for non-collectors and small-purchase buyers of low- or modestly-priced wines.  In Part 2 of this topic, I discussed the problem of getting wine advice within the principal loci of non-elite retail wine purchasing today. In Part 3, I shall explore the function, promise, and pitfalls of the common ‘shelf talk’ cards, on which most buyers rely for guidance, given the prevailing absence of visible, informed staff. Here, as throughout “The Wine Tribune’, my perspective will reflect the plight of the non-affluent, the non-expert, the buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines, and the buyer of wines intended to be drunk, not stored, or aged.]

Shelf-Talkers

This [or just ‘shelf talk’] is the tradespeak term for the little descriptive cards hanging along the edge of a wine shelf directly beneath a column of wine bottles. They are usually created by producers or importers and provided to local distributors who place them on shelves or provide them to retailers. Deployed and maintained properly, they have the potential to provide information that helps consumers to understand the qualities of the wines they describe and better informs their choice.   In my considerable experience, their actual deployment — and especially their maintenance — in supermarkets and many smaller niche chain markets, is, with few exceptions, anything but proper.

To be sure, there are some big retailers and supermarkets who do provide what I have usually found to be helpful, reliable shelf talkers or their equivalents. These use up-to-date ratings from reputable sources.  They are rare, but to cite two from two shopping locations I now frequent:

·         Costco provides vintage-specific cards with mostly useful information for buyers, though they show an over-reliance on the opinions of the quirkily generous James Suckling.  If a newer-vintage wine has not yet been rated, they state that;  and they may cite ratings of earlier vintages, quite possibly cherry-picking only high, and omitting any low, ratings. In other cases, they simply proceed directly to their usually reliable, if more generic, descriptions.

[You have to do more time-consuming research than most wine plebs will are likely to undertake to sniff out potential subterfuges in even this, to me, mostly helpful system.  They self-evidently omit scores from bad vintages;  they may claim that no reviews are yet available when only unfavorable ones are;  they surely pick favorable snippets from what are usually longer reviewer descriptions;  and they pick reviews from sources who reviewed/scored the wine most favorably.  In my view, these are mild selection biases that I expect most sane retailers to employ with some frequency.]

·         A local supermarket with the best selection in our small shopping area does allow some distributor-provided shelf-talkers; but I know that they make time to taste a lot of wine and that they supplement the distributor cards with their personally hand-lettered ones to steer shoppers to less known, less marketed value wines that they have found to possess outstanding qualities.  The cards are usually written on decidedly non-glossy, non-colorful wine-case-divider cardboard with magic markers. Of necessity, they are concise, pithily descriptive value recommendations to try a wine that most shoppers would probably not have noticed. And I have found them to be inerrantly helpful and trustworthy.  As in other wine retail venues of this quality, staff members are able to provide helpful advice.

These, however, are noteworthy types of exceptions. It is far more common for shelf talkers to:

• • • Refer to previous vintages, not shown, that once received a high score or favorable reference and then remain on the shelf for years to mis-describe lesser or failed vintages. In the meantime, the winery may have been sold to some conglomerate and degraded to lower quality production; still claiming the qualities of the original label as long as they can get away with it.   [I confess to having occasionally left tiny marks on some boasting shelf-talkers that I knew to be outdated, and I still see them hanging there years later, like the decade-old ‘going out of business’ ‘fire sale’, or ‘final clearance’ signs blaring in the windows of surplus and discount stores in tourist-trap areas everywhere.]

[Remember:  most retailers do nothing at all or just leave up old shelf-talkers until salesmen or paid shelf-stockers decide to replace them. Too often, if a reputable producer’s vintage is poor, the retailer is not aware enough to avoid it; and in high-volume, multi-department, one-stop super-stores or in smaller wine-as-an-afterthought venues, the corporate or store buyer may be incentivized, legally or covertly, to over-stock it and thus help move the wine out of warehouses. Most wine-lovers/enjoyers of any socio-economic caste understand that every producer has better and lesser vintages, but very few shoppers have the time to memorize them annually, especially as they vary by geography, climate events, or just bad luck. In such cases, sales-over-integrity corporate types know that leaving in place a favorable card from an earlier vintage, or a positive generic card will help launch a poor product into the carts of unsuspecting innocents. This same mentality [retailer ignorance or cynical ‘arrangements’] applies to far-too-old — usually white — wines that were found, for whatever reason, buried under newer ones in warehouses and to wines that somewhere in the process were stored in too-hot, too-cold, flooded, or otherwise undesireable areas and best moved quickly.] 

• • •  Cite some gold, silver, or bronze medal awarded by some obscure or pompously-named wine competition in small print such as the ‘xxxxxxx [XX] County Annual International Wine Awards Competition’ [from any of the 3,143, or so, counties, parishes, or boroughs in the US].  The more meaningful of these, from significant California, metropolitan, and other wine-related areas, are multi-day events with large selections of wines, run seriously with competent, if often regionally-biased, tasting panels.  Many, however, are thrown-together affairs, scheduled between the ‘Kids Cookie Decorating Contest’ and the ‘Great Annual Chili Cook-off’ at the local county fairs or food events with a too-small selection of heavily marketed wines provided by local distributors and a panel of area public officials and TV weather-casters or — much worse — ‘news’ personalities’.  These ‘awards’ are cited on shelf-talkers, sometimes with no, or very sketchy, attributions, as number scores, medals, quotes, or award-aggregates — ‘Winner of 17 Gold Medals’. They are also flashed on glossy medallions glued to some lower-end or jug wine bottles.

• • •  Worse yet, many cite neither awards nor useful information;  just the same vapid blather about glorious vineyards and the putative quality, aromas, and flavors of their wines that is pretty much also the unhappy norm on wine bottle back labels as described in the next post.

In Part 4 of this topic, I’ll discuss the final, and sadly ever-worsening, in-store [though not yet in-restaurant] hope for a source of  helpful  consumer information:  the labels — front and back — on the bottles themselves.  As always, I will do so from the perspective of the non-affluent, non-expert buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines intended to be drunk soon.