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#6 Posted: Oct 10, 2009 18:04
Do you "guys" use online wine clubs, or go to the state store? What are the advantages/disadvantages of both?
Wine Clubs are good ways of forcing yourself to try new things. Period. But they are, as it happens, a fairly good way of doing that, and that's something all wine lovers should do, as some point in the learning process, and it can be very hard to do if you have to make your own choices.
Many out-of-state sellers, wine clubs included, will either outright ship to Pennsylvania (which is legal, by the way), or work with you to find the wink-and-nudge alternative that will allow you to drink their wine. Some won't, unfortunately, because the Commonwealth has successfully intimidated many of them. But, with a little research, you should find one that fits and is willing to fill your needs, whatever they may be.
Having said that, the point of wine clubs is that you buy their choices.
The State Stores are retailers, and so presumably are dedicated to putting you together with your choices.
The usual line is that they are not very good at that. I'll presume to disagree. The fact is that they have their strengths and weaknesses, and offer often surprisingly good choices at great prices.
To start with their greatest weakness: they are constrained, by law, in their pricing. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it appears to me that they must sell items at a fairly set markup over their cost. That markup, when you factor in the Flood Tax, is fairly steep. Now, one might think that means their prices are uniformly bad. One would be wrong. Fact is, other retailers' markups are all over the map: they may sell some wines at a loss, and sell others at a steep premium. The PLCB will never do either.
Following the implications of that can be tricky, in some cases. On the simple end, any wine which is extremely popular on release will almost always be a bad deal at a State Store: other retailers will use them as loss-leaders to get traffic in the door, and we will not match that. These are the prices on which most of the complaints will be based, because no matter how much we'd like to think we are each an original, the fact is that a ridiculously high percentage of wine buyers are usually after a surprisingly small number of labels.
Conversely, any wine which goes up in price after wholesale release, usually due to great reviews, is likely to be a good deal at a State Store, if it can be found, because other retailers will often jack up the prices. Likewise older wines, depending on how you feel about storage. And note I said wholesale release: the price which distributors, and the PLCB, pay for a wine is often set long before the wine is actually available. If demand for the wine subsequently rises, most prices in the supply chain will follow suit. But the PLCB will have locked its own cost down before the rise, and their retail price will be based on that. So those wines will often sell at considerably lower prices here than they do elsewhere.
And these days the PLCB has started using its purchasing power much more aggressively, and the result, in Chairman's Selections and elsewhere, are prices that can be absolutely remarkable.
As to choice: in my experience, the better State Stores will have a range of wines comparable to many of the better independent retailers. The thing is, they will all have the same choice, in the main. Each store will only vary slightly in its offerings, whereas across the river in Jersey competing retailers will have entirely different stock.
On the other hand, that slight store-to-store variation adds up: if you learn to use the entire PLCB system, I daresay it is the greatest single selection available anywhere. And that is not so very hard to do, given the online resources available.
The bottom line is that I probably would be unhappy if I had to use the PLCB alone. But I think I'd be much more unhappy if I no longer had the PLCB to use.
Hope some of this helps. Almost all of it has complicating factors, so let me know if you have questions.
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