So as someone that spends a lot of time tucked away with other wine professionals, spending most of my time dining with, drinking with, reading the language of people who do this wine thing for a living, it can be easy to forget that the average person either doesn’t know or doesn’t really care about half the stuff we rattle on and on about. I can stand there with a customer yammering about flavors, aromas and textures and I can literally see them glassing over. “Yeah, but is it good?” often what I hear after a five minute description of a particular bottle of wine. Hard to reel it in at times, especially when you are charged with writing something that will compel a consumer to try it. What do they want to know….I mean other than “Is it good?” the history, the flavors, the texture? Hard to know and honestly much like everything with wine, it’s all subjective.
I’ve gotten to where I love dealing with both the, “Tell me everything” customer as well as the, “Just give me something yummy” ones and all the ones between. Hell, I get to either wax rhapsodic about wines I dig or get to plunk a bottle in someone’s hand and save the verbiage for the newsletter and shelf talkers. It’s all good but there is one particular kind of consumer that I’ve yet to learn how to really deal with….
“Do you have that Almond Champagne?” a customer looking for the very popular Almondage sparkling wine. Hey, I don’t judge, people love it and I love selling it to them. Sure the word Champagne following the word almond might make me cringe but she’s not asking for a lesson, she’s looking to get her sweet drink on. So I lead her to the sparkling wine section and as I put the bottle in her hand she says, complete with eye rolling and heavy sigh, “Oh and can you show me a Chenin Blanc? I have to get one for a friend, she knows nothing about wine” Um….really? She doesn’t know anything?
“Oh this is a vanilla flavored wine” a customer reading a shelf talker in our Zinfandel department. “This would be perfect since I add grape juice to my wine when I drink it” kind of frozen with fear here. Do we step in and let her know it’s not flavored, that the vanilla note is merely a flavor profile not an actual flavoring or do we sell her the bottle hoping that she likes it well enough with her grape juice? In this case we waited to see if she was actually going to grab the bottle before “correcting” her….she didn’t and moved on to the Rose section. Here we go again, “Oh this would be Steve’s department” again with the rolling eyes and hoity voice. “He likes these kinds of wines” and she laughs! She laughs, vanilla grape juice lady is laughing at her friend who I am assuming drinks White Zinfandel . Awesome.
Yeah, I have a real problem with the whole wine snob business; always have, but the wine snob that has no business trying to be one? Well I’m starting to figure out how to deal with them…bite my tongue until it bleeds. Let someone else call them out on their bullshit. I can just sit back, revel in the joy that can be retail wine sales and hell, even get a little post out of it.
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11 comments:
Just a beautiful day on the job. But I've learned to rationalize those folks as "wine is a journey, and everyone has to start it sometime." We just happen to be miles off in the distance of them. They will catch up eventually maybe. But I still tend to end up feeling like Jack Black's character in High Fidelity.
Kevin,
Oh man, the Jack Black feeling....I know it well. I don't mind the newbies at all, it the "Almond Champagne" drinker that looks down their nose at what anyone else is drinking that gets me. Can be funny though...
But how will we make our Almond Cookie Royal without Almondage to pour the vanilla liqueur into?? (I made that one up yesterday, by the way. Can't figure out why Merritt gave me the evil eye.....)
Gotta add, this is a frequent complaint in the beer world, too. "Oh man, you love craft beer? Me too! Blue moon is like my favorite beer ever!"
Lisa,
That was me giving you the evil eye, people often get us confused. That sounds truly nasty....
OK. Sam. Give me the five second education. I get it that Almondage is the name of the wine and not its flavoring. But is it crap? too sweet, no flavor, something only idiots buy? or, is it a decent champagne - not one of the stellar ones that you love - that someone who's looking to move up from Cook's might like to try? I also suspect that it is a sparkling white, and not from Champagne at all. thanks.
webb,
Almondage is a flavored sparkling wine, I don't care for it much both because it's cheaply made and it is pretty sweet. I think starting with a sparkling wine is a good start and I think there is none better than Roederer Estate....plus it's pretty wildly available so you might be able to find it. It's about $20 here, not sure about your area but it is a beautiful sparkler for sure.
Great post & it's something that all of us in the bidness feel. It's the small victories of turning someone on & having them come back & say "oh...my...god. That wine was freaking amazing." or even just seeing someone smile when I ask them how it was is good enough for me.
At my shop, we simply didn't carry products like sparkling almond with loads of sugar.
It limited the kinds of frustrating conversations you refer to Sam.
On the downside: I left it five years ago, but today that shop is no longer in business...
No matter how we choose to cut it, if you want to reach 90-plus percent of wine consumers, you need to carry, bite your tongue, and sell what they seek.
Thanks, Sam. Not yet ready for wine 101, but appreciate the remedial course. For Christmas I had a bottle of sparkling white, that I believe was Ste. Hillaire. It was lovely. Hope it's not crap! I really like champagne-type wines, but prefer the sweeter ones, not usually a fan of brut, but am willing to give them a try, now that I have moved up from Cooks.
As much as I love the flavor of almond, I promise NOT to buy almond-flavored wine - not ever! Thanks for the lesson.
That box of wine in the photo brought back a lot of memories. Franzia box o' pink wine was my tipple of choice when I was 16. I could tear through those boxes like nobody's business!
Michael,
Right?! It never matters to me if I personally like or dislike a wine that I sell someone. If they love it, come back for more and become wine drinkers because of what we turn them on to....well, that's just one of the most satisfying feelings there is. I know a lot of people that talk smack about Moscato and Stella Rosa and I just don't get it. First of all we all started somewhere and even if the people that love those wines never move beyond that, at least they are drinking wine, isn't that what, as a industry, we want? Plus it's kind of like sex to me, I don't care what you do in the privacy of your own home....even the juice and wine lady, hey get your swerve on, just drink wine!
Thomas,
Exactly. We struggle a little too with not carrying all the big brands that people know and feel safe buying. No KJ, no Blackstone, no Moet...things like that. The saving grace for us is that we are located in a rather industrial area so most people looking for those kind of things don't drive out of their was to see us....don't need to when they can find it in their local market and Costco. We serve the well seasoned consumer that is comfortable learning new wines and a large, (and growing) population of folks looking for sweet wines. We would never turn our nose up at anything either group was looking to drink.
webb,
My pleasure and for the record, it you want to drink almond flavored wine...do it! It wasn't the fact that the woman in this post was looking for Almondage that bothered me. I sell it and lots of people love it. What bothered me was her looking down on her friend's preference for Chenin Blanc, which while a bit of a throw away grape here in California, makes some of the most refined and delicious wines when they come from Vouvray and Montlouis (regions in the Loire Valley in France) so her idea that she was someone superior, (which bugged me too, why would you do that to a friend?) by drinking her flavored sparkling wine was just snooty and way far from the truth. Any snobby shit bothers me but I find it harder to deal with the snobby ones that have it so wrong.
I don't know the wine you tasted but never fear that liking sweet is in any way unsophisticated, what you like is what you like and no one can ever say that is incorrect. Have you tired Moscato d'Asti? Fizzy, sweet (but balanced) wine from Italy....delicious. Seek one out and tell me what you think!
Sara,
You were drinking at 16?! Naughty thing you......I would never. Well I would never have been drinking wine, I was playing quarters with Miller Genuine Draft...blech.
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