It’s A New Dawn – It’s A New Day
That song by Nina Simone always sends shivers down my spine – good ones – it just makes me feel like we can do anything ~ let’s hope in 2011 we can.
We are going to start the year here at Wine at Five with a bunch of fresh ideas. One that I have been toying with will begin very soon – here’s the gist of it:
Beginning in January 2011 Wine at Five will host a very special monthly event – Bring out Your Jam. The idea is simple and has been initiated by requests from many of our customers. How many really good bottles of wine do you have tucked away in your cellar? How often do you actually get to drink them? Do you honestly have enough friends with whom you would want to open that precious 1983 Amarone with, and would they really appreciate it? Those were some of the questions posed to us by clients. And it’s true – many of us don’t bring out the glorious wines because we don’t think we have anyone to share them with. Beginning January we want to create an evening event where you can delve into the murky corners of your cellar and Bring out Your Jam. Each month I will send out an e-mail invitation to dinner at Morgan’s Restaurant in Rye. Only 7 places will be available. Along with the e-vite will be the rules for that dinner. So, for example, in January the dinner may center on Bordeaux, 1st to 5th growths from 1980-1989. Anyone can attend but it will be on a first come first served basis and along with the RSVP you must indicate which of the prescribed wines you will bring to the dinner – full details – name of the wine, vintage and a photo of the actual bottle. Assuming you have the wine, you will be signed up and an invitation will be sent directly to you. The cost for each dinner, inclusive of tax and service will be $85.00 per person. The cost must be paid to Wine at Five by credit card or cash and there can be no refunds for cancellations.
There will be an added sense of excitement – at every dinner I will receive the wines beforehand and will decant them prior to eating. During the dinner you will drink each of them ‘blind’. At the end of the dinner each guest will be given a scorecard and you will be asked to rate the wines you have just drunk. The guest who has the highest score will receive a Gift Certificate from Wine at Five for $65.00 – rules are in place for a tied first place.
I hope that these monthly dinners will entice you to Bring out Your Jam – some of your best wines that rarely see the light of day but now can be share by other wine enthusiasts. I shall post details of the first dinner very shortly, and I am always open to ‘theme’ suggestions.
That’s the first New Day Idea. The second is I want to begin to move away from e-mail notices and begin updating the web site directly. I know that in reality many of you actually enjoy receiving the Weekly Re’Wine’der e-mail, but in practicality it will be much more efficient to turn to the web site to see what’s happening. And so to entice readers to visit the site more frequently, we will initiate a Web Price Surprise every month. The web has radically changed the way retailers shop – price competition over the past Christmas season was so ferocious that I for one will probably start ‘shorting’ retail stocks over the next few weeks, once we begin to see preliminary profit margin reports – which I suspect will be insignificant based on the margins that stores were willing to sell ‘on-line’. But we don’t ‘sell’ wine over the internet – many of the wines we source are made in such limited quantities that there is no need to ‘dump’ them on the web. Similarly I don’t see the attraction of selling anonymously over an electronic platform where the entire spirit of the wine is left spiritless. And fortunately we are in a position where we don’t need to artificially create cash flow to survive – thus allowing us to spend more time sourcing great wine for our loyal customers. However, I would like to see a move toward the web-site and therefore in order to entice customers and readers to visit the site more often, we will post a web-site special. We will take a known wine brand, not one that we necessarily sell in store, and post it on the web-site at actual cost. No mark-up, no profit, nada. It will be there for as long as inventory lasts – you won’t know when it will be posted, you won’t know how long it will be up for – so you’ll have to visit often!
In the meantime I would like to let you in on one of my finds already this year. From the importers who brought us Broc Cellars, we tasted earlier this week two wines from Abeja Vineyards in Walla Walla, Washington. The pedigree of this vineyard is unquestionable; you have the founding wine-maker of Canoe Ridge, John Abbot, teamed with a 35 year business-guru, Ken Harrison, famed for his meticulous detail and exceptional foresight, as well as a rumored love of Cabernet and fine wine! Both men are driven by a mutual vision – to drink something worth drinking. Their production is tiny, their vineyards are swept by hand, and their grapes are picked over three times before they drop into a fermentation tank. These are not wines that pretend to be wine. These are wines that share cellar space proudly alongside Mouton Rothschild and Petrus. They were astonishingly good, and I was thrilled to have tried them. So I bought a case of each – their Cabernet 2006 and their Chardonnay 2009. I was told that if I was a good boy I might be able to buy one or two more cases in the near future. I remember, right at the beginning of this retail adventure of mine, I said to myself that I would not be fashioned by other’s opinions, critics ratings and wine prices. The wine had to be good – it had to stand out as something beautiful and different – whether it cost $10 or $100, whether Parker or the Wine Enthusiast scored it 100 or 56, if I liked it and if I wasn’t embarrassed by it then I would sell it. Abeja is a wine that you are going to hear a lot about over the coming years. It is going to get rated 95+ and it is going to get priced at $100+ but for now I don’t think it has a rating and both wines combined are only a few dollars over $100. The chardonnay, which I ranked as one of the best chardonnays I have drunk from the west coast in a long time is $48 and the Cabernet is $54.00. One case of each presently available.
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