Tag: Wine plebs

The Ill-Served Wine Plebs in Restaurants: Part 1 – The Unhappy Realities

[“…But wine plebs are definitionally not able financially to pursue that goal. Nor, even for special occasions, are upscale restaurants the rational places to do so. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to declare them categorically to be the LAST places they should choose….Extortionate wine markups predominate in restaurants at all levels. Industry orthodoxy deems them a necessity if any profit is to be made at all.  This is the norm; the upscale restaurants merely amplify the wallet damage by fixing a higher bottom point to their price range. For by-the-glass wines, this can make a single glass cost just about what a perfectly decent, non-pedigreed entrée would cost at a quality ‘ethnic’ or casual restaurant without patrician pretensions, high-priced free-agent chefs, hip décor, expense-account- or millennial-magnet location, or price-bloating ideology….There are very few affordably-priced restaurants where wine plebs can learn or discover anything about wine…”]

 

The Ill-Served Wine Plebs in Restaurants 1: The Unhappy Realities

In the first four entries in this series beginning with https://thewinetribune.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/the-ill-served-wine-buying-plebs-1-retail-sources-of-help-and-advice/, I examined the realities confronting wine plebs when they seek advice at off-the-shelf retail wine settings.  In this new series, I extend that analysis to the other major venue for in-person wine purchases: licensed restaurants.

In this series, I examine the wine-related realities that wine plebs face when they frequent dinner restaurants with affordable menus or seek out pricier ones for infrequent, special-occasion, relative splurges.  Wine plebs [as opposed, in this classification, to wine patricians] are all those non-affluent, non-expert consumers of lower-end and modestly priced wines not vinified for significant aging.  This blog is about and for them. This series addresses the realities, limits, character, and pricing of the wines available to them in restaurants they can afford. It addresses, too, the nature of the advice and service those restaurants tend to provide for those who enjoy but lack expertise and broad experience with wine.

Our focus on wine plebs logically excludes from discussion most ‘fine-dining’ restaurants as that formulation is currently applied at the more traditional end of the expensive restaurant spectrum.  It also excludes numerous other self-proclaimed temples of culinary creativity, correctness, or campy-chic cuisines;  the kind that rely on just-in-time conformity to cost-raising trends, on self-determined  standards, and on some interplay of  fusion, ‘deconstruction’, and juxtaposition sufficient to get media and social media attention.  Unfortunately, these higher-end restaurants are where we are likely to find the better, more professionally selected wine lists, though they may also be overwhelmingly encyclopedic, overly in [lock]-step with current trends and crazes, or more aristocratically composed — and priced — wine lists.

If the wine-related goal of restaurant-going is to have access to a knowledgeably-selected and served range of wines, without concern for price, to learn how it accompanies a prepared and served meal;  then, assuredly, upscale restaurants are the places to go.

But wine plebs are definitionally not in position financially to pursue that goal. Nor, even for special occasions, are upscale restaurants the rational places to do so. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to declare them categorically to be the LAST places that plebs should choose to learn more about wine.

Extortionate wine markups predominate in restaurants at all levels. Industry orthodoxy deems them a necessity if any profit is to be made at all.  This is the norm; the upscale restaurants merely amplify the wallet damage by fixing a higher bottom point to their price range. For by-the-glass wines, this can make a single glass cost just about what a perfectly decent, non-pedigreed entrée would cost at a quality ‘ethnic’ or casual restaurant without patrician pretensions, high-priced free-agent chefs, hip décor, expense-account- or millennial-magnet location, or price-bloating ideology.

There are very few affordably-priced restaurants where wine plebs can learn or discover anything about wine in general beyond — at best if they are fortunate — getting a helpful suggestion about which glass or bottle of wine might be a decent accompaniment to the food they’ve ordered.  Wine bars were supposed to fulfill this role, and some do, but they tend to be clustered in metro areas or in wine country.

For the rest of us, the best places to do so are probably small, first-generation [and/or culturally enclaved], minimally-decorated, out-of-the-way, food-first [not ‘total dining experience’] restaurants serving an un-fused or un-watered down, narrowly regional or ethnic cuisine ordinaire with a small list of less commonly-encountered, and modestly priced, approachably and characteristically flavored, wines from the same general locale or tradition.

In my opinion, these are unquestionably the best places to dine out, regardless of prices. There are many good ones to be found, and not only in metropolitan areas. Unfortunately for wine plebs, the absolute [and even more so, the relative] numbers of immigrants from historically integrated food-and-wine regions of Europe — Western or Eastern — and Transcaucasia [or Western Asian] from modest backgrounds still close enough to their dining traditions  — and for whom opening a small, work-intensive, family-staffed restaurant is an appealing aspiration — have dwindled.

Today, they are likely to be Asian, North African, Middle Eastern, or Mexican/Central/South American. Some of these places have long wine-with-food traditions; others have nascent wine industries pioneered by a few older producers, but for many, their culinary impact is, at best, small and developing;  others have no such traditions of note at all.

For wine plebs, this reality illuminates yet another constraint on their ability to find competent assistance in their exploration of wines in restaurants. The main issue here is the limited wine-list types available to them in these best-case types of restaurants, let alone in the all-too-sprawling profusion of available wine/beer-licensed chain, franchise, theme, varyingly-hyphenated-casual, family, fastish food ‘stores’, and similar options.

With distressing regularity, the wine list offerings in these latter, ubiquitous restaurants tend to be much like the food: uninspired, available everywhere, copied, and adapted or ‘re-interpreted’ in thousands of similar venues, unlikely ever to be out of stock at any level from producer/bottler to local distributor [but seldom with specified vintages].

Understanding how we arrived at this situation requires some explanatory background and a survey of the concurrent transformations that have characterized the U.S. wine and restaurant industries from the outset, and then from the later 1960s to the present. This will be the subject of the second post in this series.

The Ill-Served Wine Buying Plebs 2: Retail Sources of Help and Advice?

“Throughout the 70s-to-2000s period, the owners of these shops had few options in the face of inexorable changes in retail scaling, in the clustering of the upper-quintile-socio-economic-caste…..But for the benighted mass, those uninitiated into even an awareness of this higher-level gnosis, however, there remain two main sources of in-store information:  the bottles themselves and the little cards meant to describe the virtues of the file of bottles directly above”

Part 2.  The Quintile Realities of Wine Retail Enclaving:  The Competently Advised and the Disregarded

In Part One of this series [https://thewinetribune.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/wine-raters-reviewers-sources-of-help-and-advice], we described the period between the 1970s beginnings 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.  Part 2 of this topic will discuss the problem of getting wine advice within the principal loci of non-elite, retail wine purchasing today.  Here, as throughout The Wine Tribune, my focus will be on 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 soon; not stored or aged.

At the time, few would have described the 1970-2000 years as a golden age of available advice for modest to low-priced wine buyers.  It was just what was then happening. Few could have foreseen the subsequent explosion of up-sized and often very up-scaled supermarkets, one-stop multi-service chains, and big-box buying clubs.  Nor could they have foreseen the gentrification of wine production, discourse, status, and pricing — though the yuppies among them were creating and implementing the process before their eyes.

Discernible or not, the unhappy result for non-affluent retail consumers, was the near-disappearance of independent small and mid-sized, knowledgeable wine shops or wine-sections selling modestly-priced wines in their non-affluent residential areas.

Throughout the 70s-to-2000s period, the owners of these shops had few options in the face of inexorable changes in retail scaling, in the clustering of the upper-quintile-socio-economic-caste, and, eventually, in the advent of online shopping:

      • They could hang on and try to survive; most — if they lasted at all — did not succeed beyond the surrender, retirement, or death of a stubborn owner.  
      • They could relocate to the elite areas.  Most, however, lacked the financial resources to undertake the much higher lease rates, upscale decor/fittings, and much more expensive inventories required to compete in those locales. 
      • They could promote lottery traffic, shrink their wine selections and reorient them jug wines and to the same heavily promoted brands found everywhere else. Those who did so often shifted emphasis to convenience and liquor-store items as well.  Many shops were forced to do this to survive. Characteristically, wine became an effectively vestigial aspect of their operations 
      • Or they could avoid complete financial failure by closing and selling off;  many ended up choosing this unhappy option.

Some wine shops did manage to survive and still do in modest towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods, but their numbers continue to decline.  In the U. S., those who drink low-to-modestly-priced wines get them from the three-large-scale outlet types cited above; from smaller-store, local or chain specialty-and-niche food-plus retailers such as Trader Joe’s, Aldi, and the like; and from the limited selections available at countless similarly-undersized, local markets. 

But the bulk of wine shops or wine sections with knowledgeable staffs that have survived — or come into being because of the changes wrought by upper-quintile stratification/clustering —have done so, overwhelmingly, in enclaves of the affluent, or even those of the ‘merely’ comfortably secure [In the US, the qualifying ‘merely’ is, of course, defined and situated at a rarely-acknowledged, historically unprecedented high level.].  The affluent and the comfortably secure are easily able to afford and occasionally get to learn about ‘better’ or ‘fine’ wine. Thus, we can easily find good wine shops with helpful staff in:

⦁  Zip codes, counties, or cities where significant concentrations of top 15-20% income earners — from any source or sector: private, public, legal, illegal, or mystifying — reside;  and/or trendier, recently gentrified, or gentrifying sections of major metropolitan areas. In these latter locales, though, the wealth is often, in significant measure, anticipatory:  younger and rooted in the socio-economic status of birth-families but living now, however well or easily, with expectations and projections about befitting careers, looming inheritances, grants, and profusions of advantaging personal and family connections made within the serial enclaves of affluence that have been the loci of their lives, etc.

⦁  State capitals, administrative centers, and other repositories of overpaid, over-pensioned higher-level government bureaucrats administrators, regulators — and the attendant encampments of lawyers, consultants, contractors, grantees, and lobbyists, and media.

⦁  College and university towns with ever-growing infestations of similarly well- and over-paid paid bureaucrats; HR staffs, compliance komissars, apparatchiks, and lawyers; diversity/social justice inquisitors and clerisy; a smaller number of academics;  often, well-pensioned, world-traveling retired teachers; and hordes of the children of affluence, their density varying with consensus institutional prestige.

⦁  Areas with a high presence of digital tech, financial service, research center, media, and entertainment industry employees, and other areas with similar concentrations of members of the cognitive/creative-control caste

⦁  Well-to-do retirement and vacation/tourism areas.

In this post and in this , I have no interest in the wealth of opportunities for helpful wine retail experiences to be found in the enclaves of the affluent. They have armies, populations of wine writers, analysts, raters, bloggers, teachers, tasting conductors, social media posters who are devoted to their tastes, needs, and price ranges — and dazzled by the disposable income they have to buy wines and wine services. 

My intent here is to enumerate, examine, and evaluate the realities of advice available to non-affluent wine shoppers [wine plebs] in the rest of the country. In finding competent wine advice at the venues they frequent, they have been as ill-served by the new realities of retail as they have been by ‘serious’ wine journalism, scorers, raters, critics, and educators in print information. See: [https://thewinetribune.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/what-arrogation/ ].

Retail Advice:  The Sorry Remaining In-Store Realities

There are exceptions to be found in below-top-15-20% locales.  Some are older shops or sections that have stubbornly resisted the departure to the enclaves of the advantaged. But for too many wine plebs, a dearth of retail wine staff capable of providing useful advice has become the norm.  Where, then, are they to turn to find a good value, an inexpensive bottle for tonight’s or this weekend’s dinner? 

There must be more than a few worthy wines on those shelves that are neither heavily advertised nor energetically merchandised, their qualities unrecognized, overlooked, doomed eventually to be carried off in the night to the hospice center that is the clearance shelves. Alternatively, those same bashful gems might be suddenly seized upon, grasped, abducted, and borne off in the shopping carts of slumming buyers of ‘better’ wines who have access to the higher knowledge dispensed in the sporadically-appearing ‘Low-Priced Wine Value Surprises’ sections of those wine-rating publications or websites that occasionally bother to sniff out high-quality, lower-priced wines.

But for the benighted mass, those uninitiated into even an awareness of this higher-level gnosis, however, there remain two main sources of in-store information:  the bottles themselves and the little cards meant to describe the virtues of the file of bottles directly above. these are commonly known in retail as ‘shelf talk’ or ‘shelf-talkers’.  [There are, of course, the unavoidable big displays and stacked cases throughout the store, but they tend to be the near-proprietary domain of favorite, high-volume distributors, showcases for periodic eruptions of short-lived trends, and cliched seasonal/holiday wines. Also, they seldom convey any useful information beyond price.]

Alas, the usefulness of the information provided on both the bottles and shelf talk cards is far more potential than actual.

In Part 3 of this series, I will examine in some detail the nature and evolution of helpful advice to be found on shelf-talkers and wine labels — and its very real limitations. And speculate on the likelihood of some probable on-the-ground retail models — as always, from the perspective of the buyers of modest-to-lower-priced wines.

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

“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.”

 

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.