Pinot Grigio imports

[Kcwhippet]

Thanks, Roberto. I was trying to think of a proper response but got bogged down with too many thoughts. Anyway, to answer Tear Wah. First off, everyone who's been here for awhile is aware of my gender, as is my wonderful wife. They also know I work in a very small shop where we sell only wine and some beer. We have limited shelf space and back room storage, so we don't stock a lot of the wines - like K-J, Sutter Home, Almaden, et al - that our warehouse sized competitors down the road stock. We generally stock one or two cases only of most wines, though with our best sellers we may bring in up to four or five cases. Our aim is to have the K-J if the customer wants it, but more importantly to offer them alternatives to the "safe choice". Our shop has about 20% of the inventory in over $25 wines, 70% in the $10 to $25 range and the balance is under $10 wines. In fact, even with our limited space, we offer over 100 wines under $10. We offer what we do precisely because of entrepenneurial courage. What courage does it take to stock a shop with something you know is a safe sell? Our decision to stock what we do goes precisely to your point of education. How are we as an industry educating the public if the majority of our shelf space is taken up with the easy wines like K-J? Our customers are not "uneducated, unwashed simpletons who have been duped". One of the major reasons we aren't a wine drinking nation is that too many people, including the majority of retail outlets, don't want to take the time to educate the consumers. We've made it a point to offer our customers the benefit of our years ITB (over twenty years in my case) to try to educate them about all the exciting wines that are available out there, because there certainly are a lot more choices available to them than the safe bets from those wineries that spend all that money on advertising and POS displays. From your tone, I'd imagine you'd be surprised at the number of customers who return time and again and ask for more recommendations after we've helped them previously.

BTW, It's really not up to me to defend his position, but I don't believe IK mentioned anything about chaptalization in his post. He said sugar, which was amplified by Roberto's statement about K-J's practice of adding unfermented Muscat juice. And you're right, RS is not a bad thing, but putting sweet grape juice into a wine labelled Chardonnay to pander to an uneducated public who's previous experience is in the realm of Blue Nun and Mateus is a disservice and an insult to those very people. I don't understand why you make the comment about the practice of adding sugar in other winemaking regions when it's really an entirely different situation. In many places it's an allowed practice only because of climate, because the grapes don't have an opportunity to evolve fully and have an acid to sugar ratio that's too unbalanced to make palatable wine. Jess Jackson has absolutely no problem getting fully ripe grapes to make his wines with, so there's no reason for him to have to add any sweetener to raise the RS. So, your claim of IK's intellectual dishonesty and bias is way out of line. His simple statement is that K-J's wines have more RS than a truly dry wine and thus appeal to people uneducated in all the other wonderful wines available.

Now I feel better.

[This message has been edited by Kcwhippet (edited 02-06-2003).]