"Deep Palate" spills wine-selling secrets

What does your wine seller really think of the wines she carries? How does she rate her customers' palates? What tricks of the trade may be used to sell you certain wines?

To find some answers, I spoke with a wine buyer for a large wine department. She buys around $150,000 worth of wine in a month, sometimes more. Her background includes extensive wine-related work in restaurants and wholesale. She comes across as bright and forthright. Clearly, she loves her work and does it well but pulls no punches when expressing her opinions. I'll call her Deep Palate (DP) to protect her identity. We sat down over coffee, and she gave me an eye-opening look behind the scenes. Here's everything you may never have known about the wine biz.

Paul Gregutt: You have a lot of responsibilities.

Deep Palate: I sell about $2.5 million a year in retail. It's not small potatoes.

PG: Describe a typical day in your work life.

DP: I walk in the door, the phone starts ringing. It could be customers; it could be vendors. I have my to-do list, which involves managing inventory, writing my own orders, making signs. At stores where sales people write their orders, they tend to squirrel in a few extra bottles, so I write the orders for them. That way, if there's too much or not enough back stock, it's because I screwed up.

PG: Screwed up how?

DP: Out-of-stocks are a bad thing. If you go into any grocery store and see something out of stock, it means somebody hasn't done their job. So you have to have Plan B wines — if a hole develops over the weekend, I can fill it.

PG: What do you look for when buying wine?

DP: Price. Value. Of course, taste. We're always looking for what we call "soft brands" — wines that are new to the market, that are low in price, that people haven't seen before, so you can blend your margins. I sell a wine like Veuve Clicquot for pennies above cost; it's a loss leader.

PG: So many wines that make the annual "Top 100" lists or get the big scores from the critics are virtually impossible to find. Does that create problems for you?

DP: We rarely if ever sell wine solely based on scores. This awful time of year when the Top 100 Wine Spectator list comes out, listing wines that you can't get; what do you do with it? Put it under the cat litter box! It's a time-waster for me; I have to stand there saying no, no, no, no. (She laughs). I think, "Look at all these great wines I have here. These are my top wines."

PG: The wine business has always been, and still is to some degree, a boys' club. Have you encountered any obstacles being a woman?

DP: I try to not think about it. Not within my own company. I do see that men tend to excel in this business faster than women, which I find tragic. Maybe they interview better. I don't see that you can't succeed in this world because you are a woman.

PG: Let's talk about wine pricing. Are sales really sales?

DP: I'm sad to say that sales signs do sell wines. Here in Washington, we've trained our customers to follow the fake.

PG: The fake?

Pick of the week


Scarlet of Paris 2004 Pinot Noir; $10. Never one to miss a wine fad, importer Joseph Victori has launched a line called Scarlet of Paris with this light and very pleasantly fruity pinot noir from Corsica, France. Much classier than Victori's wines named for animals, Fat Croc Chardonnay; crude puns, Royal Bitch Shiraz; and jingoistic slogans, United We Stand Merlot; this is just right for those who want a flavorful pinot noir for less than 10 bucks. Fragrant and earthy, it's definitely a rustic, country wine, but the fruit is substantial and the alcohol refreshingly light. (Unique).

DP: The temporary price-reduction tag with the false front-line "regular" price that the wine never reaches. In my store, we've done away with sales signs. But even though the actual price didn't go up — it was still, say, $8.99 — the sign didn't say, "down from $10.99." And you know what? Sales went down.

PG: What did you decide to do after you pulled the sale signs and sales went down. Did you just let them drift down? Did they stabilize? What was your response?

DP: All of the above — sales stabilized on some wine, I found new wine to replace others and made those displays less visible but kept the wine around for those who wanted it whether it showed savings or not.

PG: What do you think about all the gimmick wines — the animals, the trucks and so on?

DP: There are wines that are from a place and usually estate-grown; those are real wines. And then there's marketing. And that's wine that comes out with a stupid animal on it. We all think it's dumb. I cringe at some of the things we have to buy. But you have to buy them because if you don't, your competitor will, and your customer will come in looking for it.

PG: Do women buy wine differently from men?

DP: I think it's true that women buy more wine. Men buy more expensive wine; they are more the collectors. Right now all ages are buying pinot noir; syrah, too.

PG: How do you rate your customers?

DP: I have really smart, savvy customers. They have traveled the world; they're on it. They are wine-loving, knowledgeable people. I can have some really obscure French wine that will sell because they spent a summer there.

Paul Gregutt is the author of "Northwest Wines." His column appears weekly in the Food & Wine section. He can be reached by e-mail at wine@seattletimes.com.