pdub

I note this is an old thread, but I'm taking the time to marvel at how many folks' experience falls together as differently-noted parts of the same experience. The French would call it "pettilant", the Italians "frizzante", but there's a shifting historic center for any given wine as to whether the fizz is intentional. If it's historically meant to be so (lambrusco, prosecco, vinho verde), you'll probably find references in the literature. Beyond all that, it's cropping up more in recent years, as well-meaning small wineries make a best-intentioned effort to cut the sulfite levels in their wines. They succeed, but the cost is wines that are gassy and unpredictable in youth. This seems to bother me more than most folks; I like health advances, but not ones that create a chameleonic or unstable product. I personally view it as absolutely unacceptable in any red, and an annoying phase for young whites. I'm always open to a good argument, but months of unapproachability and warped flavor are not the same as the vicissitudes of normal character development for inexpensive whites. In a wine over $10 retail (again, one not in a regional style that supports petillance), I don't think referring to gassiness as bad craftsmanship is an overstatement. pw An unrelated note: the best description of brettanomyces I remember is "wet dog in july" PW

Yo, Bruiser, Soooooooooo, you're thinkin maybe: "2+2=4, for just about everybody but me." "Myself, I like to show up just at about the time when a production fielded by a hard-working young entrepreneur is entering its dying throes. At those times, I find that sometimes, just before the funeral, 2+2=3. Then, I go look for another funeral. It's a way of changing the usual inevitability of math-like things" Something along those lines? Or, you meant that you'd rather get takeout from the entrepreneur, go to the wine shop, get just what you want and some paper cups, and take it out on a "piquenique"? This time of year, that's not such a bad idea. PW

To CR: All well-taken, and again, the market will mostly do what it wants to. Half-glasses are also a great concept, if they're fairly presented (see following): Where I am, it's after 12:30 AM, so if you're having trouble sleeping, I can perhaps help that by reciting some math at you... I'M GONNA PUT YOU TO SLEEP HERE, I CAN JUST ABOUT GAR-ON-DAM-TEE IT-- Standard small-shop retail on wine is around 50%. Wholesalers know that, and they price-point to take advantage, like listing a wine at $79.92 per case, which just happens to work out to 6.66 a bottle, which marks up to $9.99. No surprise to anyone. At retail, now the big stores step in. Their goal, and I'm generalizing, but it's as true of books as of wine, is to cut the selling price, steal buyers from the small, personal service merchant, then take that volume back to the wholesaler or supplier and squeeze them for some sort of compensation (discounts, which may not be legal, free cases, free shipping, SOMETHING which drags the cost down from 6.66 to 5.33, at which point their "giveaway" $7.99 retail actually yields the same 50% markup, only for a lot more buyers. (Z-Z) Meanwhile, over at the restaurant, they have no chance to sell a whole case to one table, so they're paying $6.66 a bottle. If they're pouring right, (and the bartender who knows nothing about wine isn't filling the glass to the rim to bolster his tip) they're getting 5 glasses per bottle, at a cost of 1.33 a glass. But the manager's bonus depends on being cautious and knowing that bartender wants his tip. Most of the time, let's say 75-80%, that manager comes to the same conclusion: LET'S CHARGE THE FULL WHOLESALE PRICE OF THE BOTTLE FOR THE FIRST GLASS, and every glass thereafter, my investors can't possibly blame me for that... So, $6.66 looks funny, so let's make it $6.75 a glass. I may not win, but I can't lose. If the bottle is thrown away, spoils, or is stolen after the first glass, I can't lose. Of course, I put security procedures in place to make sure that those things seldom happen. So, on a bottle where those things don't happen, what do the diners pay for a bottle that retails for $9.99 small shop and 7.99 big barn? 5 times 6.75 = $33.75, 33.75/6.66 = a hair over 500% markup on cost. (Z-Z-Z-Z) Half-glasses? Ok, this is a value-added service, AND there's additional risk for stock to get lost, I have to get at least $4 ($40/btl, 600%), or as much as $4.99 ($50/btl, 750%) for that $10 wine. Plus maybe if I'm Outback, I can muscle the supplier to throw an extra shrimp on the barbie, maybe pay for my employee picnic -- to boost my 750% to 800%. Remember, I'm pro-small restaurateur. Little guys work hard for long hours, and if they don't demand fair compensation, they disappear, so I'm for finding interesting ways for them to get paid. But big corporate houses hire guys whose job it is to charge a lot for a little by making it seem just so -- well, vibrant. (ZZZZZZZZZZZ) Meanwhile, suppose the supplier has a fine Carneros (or Nuit St. Georges) Pinot Noir at $20 (cost) a full bottle -- yes, god forbid, that means $20 a glass if you open it, and MUCH more risk that you won't sell it all and take -- OK, no loss but way less profit. There's a half-bottle available, but the supplier has HIS value-added hoop to jump through too, so a half bottle is $12 cost. Suppose my linear pricing formula is 2x cost + $7 = $31, and no waste, because you don't open it until it's sold. At 2.5 glasses per half bottle, would the diner rather pay: -- $20 a glass, $13 a half-glass under the glass-sales model, with a risk of loss to the seller, or --$12.40 a glass, $6.20 a half glass with the entire product sold and no additional risk to the seller. THAT'S why everybody wins on a half-bottle program, but it would take a real concern for educating the customer. (ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ...) Are we snoozin' yet?

Everybody's right. They're a production-line pain. They're a great idea for diets and health, and even hard-core "grazing" mentalities like me. At base, I think the supply/demand curve drives it all. Quoting you ten-year-old figures, just so I don't have to go off and do a bunch of research this second, the average Portuguese adult drinks 24 gallons of wine a year, and 2.4 gallons of soda pop, a 10/1 ratio. In the US, the ratio is reversed, which is why you can find Coke in small, medium, large, commemorative bottles, NASCAR bottles, etc. A similar ten years back, some folks in CA (in my head it was mostly folks at RH Phillips, but if I'm wrong someone will correct me...) actually fought the BATF to get the half-liter bottle reinstated. The logic was very bright: two non-hedonistic folks could share a half-liter with dinner and go home pretty sober (even moreso if they had the soybean and mashed-yeast entree with their 2/3 -bottle...), and they won on that logic, the BATF said OK, but where are all those half-liter bottles now? On the special-order list at the bottle company. At one point in the last few years, I was doing purchasing for a company that had a spec for 15amp electrical wall receptacles. 25 years ago, they were the standard, but now electricians commonly install 12ga wire and 20amp receptacles, and don't like to stock 2 sets of parts. Net effect? If you go out today and buy a thousand each, the heavier duty 20A might be $1.05 each while at similar quality the lighter 15A might be $2.20 each. Not a judgment of capacity or quality, just of demand. Are half-bottles still a great idea? Yes, they are.

To both Katie L and Mark S: Katie: Having run a restaurant in Philadelphia many years ago, the oddity there was the state ABC monopoly. The restaurant only got a 1/6 (16+%) discount off the public's single-bottle retail price (AND you got to drive to their warehouse and pick it up yourself...), so a few entrepreneurs took the position that since you couldn't make any money on it anyway, you might as well turn it into a publicity stunt. That was the mid-70's, and a guy who later became a west-coast celebrity chef was running a $1-over-retail winelist at the Chesnut Hill Hotel. Mark: You are, of course, right. Restaurants don't sell wine, liquor and wine stores sell wine. Restaurants sell a compound experience which includes a decor, big rent, a kitchen that costs maybe a quarter-million to fit out, some sort of wine storage system, service staff, glassware, linens, computers, a dishwasher, etc. While the entrepreneur is free to pursue suicidal publicity however he or she wishes, any winelist price under 2x retail is a loss leader, and the loss has to be slipped to the customer under another guise. That said, I'm a big advocate of linear-formula pricing, which for non-trade folks is a technical term for sticking it to the cheapskate. The math is m*x+b (this is a twenty-year-old concept, and your favorite local haunt may have been using it for that long), but the net effect is that instead of triple cost on everything which would lead you to $10 for Sutter Home WZ and $60 for Acacia PN, you wind up at $14 for the WZ (not enough!) and $37 for the Acacia. The entrepreneur agrees to take progressively less percent markup as you move up the food chain, but he encourages the customer to move up and be adventuresome with the good stuff. Instead of just being a loss leader, it actually pays the rent by giving the knowledgeable patron a break.