Wine Library in-stock issues?

I ordered a bottle of Leon Beyer Pinot Blanc from Wine Library last night, and got an email at 9:24 ET that they were out of stock. That's fine, it happens, but then why is it still available on their website?

This sort of thing drives me nuts, how can you accept an order for a wine you don't have. They have the best price, but the price is purely theoretical if they don't have stock. Anyone else have this happen to them? I love the GVTV, but this is my first attempted purchase.

As an aside, can anyone think of any wines that have "Beyer" in the name; a family member just got promoted to "Buyer," and I wanted to send a punny bottle of wine as a gift.

Walt

[Robin Garr]

I ordered a bottle of Leon Beyer Pinot Blanc from Wine Library last night, and got an email at 9:24 ET that they were out of stock. That's fine, it happens, but then why is it still available on their website?

Walt, I know it's immensely frustrating, but based on a very little experience helping a wine shop work through a plan to set up an online system and link the Website to the POS system, I can tell you that it's not as easy as it seems, and very few places can truly show only "live" inventory online. Outside the world of wine, I've placed orders with both LL Bean and Amazon.com only to learn to my frustration that they were out of stock and, in at least one case, would never have any more of the out-of-stock item.

If this happened once or twice with an online vendor, I'd shrug it off. If it became a frequent occurrence, I would want to know about it.

As Robin said, this happens all the time...and not just in wine, but in all on-line order situations. Frustrating, sure. But, like any other business with any other product, the customers will learn who is largely reliable and who is not, who is responsible and who is not, and who takes care of customers and who does not.

Trouble with wine over the internet is---in my opinion---I don't like purchasing wine from people I don't know. I know, I know, that makes me an old style guy, a fuddy duddy from a past age, because I also don't like buying things I can't touch and feel before purchasing.

With wine over the internet (woi?) you may not be dealing with a person at all, but an automated system. And when you have a problem you may not be able to interface with a person either...at least, not without one remove. And I don't wish to deal with that; I have to in other instances, but I don't have to in this one. Thank god there's still enough bricks and mortar places to keep an old dinosaur happy until he becomes extinct.

You know Hoke, I also buy very little wine over the Internets, and what I do is almost exclusively stuff I know I'm going to like. I buy a lot (from my perspective, I'm a tiny fish in absolute terms) of wine from places like Dee Vine that have tastings, and almost nothing from retailers that I don't really know. Certainly the browsing is much more fun than the searching that the online inventories provide. Even in a crummy supermarket wine section I can easily keep myself entertained for twenty minutes by idly calculating the percentage of Gallo labels by shelf space, and remarking, "They're charging $24 for *that*?"

Robin, I've had pretty good luck ordering things online. I don't think I've ever had an out-of-stock issue from a retailer with a genuine shopping cart. With the places that have you email them, sure. But never with full-fledged on-line ordering. Wine Library, according to a 2006 figure, has $10 million in annual web sales, as part of $45 million in total sales, so they are about the same size as, say, Lands' End. I find it hard to give them a pass when they clearly aren't using some chintzy "upload your inventory spreadsheet to a website" product with that kind of volume. It's not a big deal in this case, I just wanted to see if others in the community have found the same thing.

Walt

The only time I buy wine over the internet is if I have no other option (i.e., Sea Smoke), I'm ordering from a small winery, or I'm simply looking for a case or two of wines under $20 to restock the cellar and try some new wines.

Like you, I perfer to look at the bottle ... feel it ... and take it home with me. This is especially important when I'm buying bottles costing more than $50.00. I'm also very nervous that I'll have to go on a business trip or I won't be home when the wine is delivered and it will get to sit on the truck over a weekend in 110 degree temperatures.

Sometimes when I'm buying a case I'll even strap it with the seatbelt and drive like I have a 2 month old in the car.

Oh, there's one other thing that is sometimes a challenge. Wineries usually "share" UPC codes across different vintages. So a 2004 Falkner Amante and a 2005 Falkner Amante may have the same UPC code. If a store carries both the 2004 and the 2005 and they don't have a way to tell the difference, they may run out of one of them. Since they share the same barcode the system may not know the difference.

This has been a HUGE challenge for me ... so I'm assuming that retail stores also struggle with this.

This has been a HUGE challenge for me ... so I'm assuming that retail stores also struggle with this.

Retailers have ALWAYS had massive struggles over this. Take it from an old retailer, old wholesaler, old restaurateur, and current supply-sider.

Some (the poor ones) ignore it, or try to.

Others try to deal with it. Most are frustrated by it.

Comes with the territory.

This has been a HUGE challenge for me ... so I'm assuming that retail stores also struggle with this.

Retailers have ALWAYS had massive struggles over this. Take it from an old retailer, old wholesaler, old restaurateur, and current supply-sider.

Some (the poor ones) ignore it, or try to.

Others try to deal with it. Most are frustrated by it.

Comes with the territory.

Yep, I can't believe that even good quality, vintage-dependent wines often have the same UPC. I enter them into Cellartracker, so I see when they change, which isn't often.

I've always found it ironic that the best wine shops are forced to use their own barcodes to track inventory, despite the presence of the UPC. Of course, a lot of wines don't have them. I do not envy the pickers at Dee Vine, trying to discern the difference between two bottles of riesling that are absolutely identical except for one has a '10' in place of an '08' in the eensy AP number. Talk about a problem custom-made for barcodes.

Walt

I guess it's a problem for everyone ... except for the producers. It's a shame too ... it would probably cost a producer a penny per bottle to generate new labels with a unique barcode. Life would be so much easier for everyone if they were unique.

Maybe we should start a campaign.

Hey, the Internet opens access to an immense range of wines. A wider range even than the wineries made.

Case in point: Early last year I was told (by Claude Kolm) that at a random time, online, you could find a couple of 1945 Romanée-Conti in magnum, "and in a good month, a Jeroboam." This, a wine of which only two barrels were made, 608 bottles IIRC, none bottled larger than 750ml (according to a very knowledgeable French gentleman, present when the wine was made). I looked online and immediately found the offerings below (saved verbatim). Among other things, this illustrates that inventory isn't the only discrepancy in online wine listings.

-----------------------------
--------, Switzerland
ROMANÉE-CONTI LA ROMANÉE-CONTI AOC - BOURGOGNE ROUGE,
1945 $66492.29
Magnum
06-Feb-2006

-----------------------------
--------, UK
Romanee Conti, 1945 $78998.64
Magnum
14-Feb-2006

I guess it's a problem for everyone ... except for the producers. It's a shame too ... it would probably cost a producer a penny per bottle to generate new labels with a unique barcode. Life would be so much easier for everyone if they were unique.

Maybe we should start a campaign.

*sigh*

I'm afraid there's a bit more to it than that, DJ.

In terms of printing costs alone, yes, maybe "a penny per bottle" might be correct. (Although a sharp eyed financial controller would take a close look at that expense as a way to eliminate, what, $50,000 for a total production of 5 million bottles.)

But, again, there's much, much more to it than saying, "Oh, just make a change." Someone has to control it, someone has to make it happen, someone has to inspect the process. And in many cases it is not the supplier who objects to the process of changing the UPC code anyway, D. J.: it's the wholesaler and retailer that objects.

Wholesalers and retailers (especially the large retailers, and especially the chains) look at wines as they look at other products: and they WANT wines, especially certain wines that are high volume items, to keep one consisten UPC code despite vintage changes. Why? Because it makes it easy for them to put it into their system, and then to maintain inventory control.

Take a basic grocery store or large wine retailer. If you sell a Chateau Cache Phloe Red Bordeaux and White Bordeaux to the retailer, he sees it as SKU #1 and SKU #2. That SKU (UPC) is then registered in the system. If it's not in the system, it can't come into the store because it is not recognized by the computer.

All inventory controls are instituted based on that number. All costs and profits per unit, all sales promotions, are based on that number. If you bring in a subsequent vintage and give it a new number, then you're adding to the work load and increasing the opportunity for confusion. You're making the retailers job more difficult, more frustrating, more confusing.....and, most importantly, more expensive to do.

So the retailer has always struggled, because with certain wines, usually high volume wines like, say Gallo or Vendange or Glen Ellen.....well, the vintage doesn't really mean all that much anyway, does it? But the problem is, where do you draw the line; where do you begin to make the distinction.

There's more...but you get the drift. It's always more complicated than you might think it is at first glance.

Okay, so maybe I oversimplified it a bit. However, there are some major benefits to having unique SKU’s based on vintage. What if a store carries a 2002 Bordeaux and a 2003 Bordeaux from the same producer. Some kid scanning the bottles might not care that the price difference could be huge. The result is that you might be selling a 2003 Bordeaux at the 2002 price. At least that’s my uneducated impression.

I suppose I look at other industries and wonder why the wine industry hasn’t adopted similar standards. Bookstore owners have a massive amount of inventory, yet every book has a unique ISBN number. This is because each version of a book is just as important as the book itself. Wouldn’t that same logic apply to a wine?

Anyhow, I apologize as I seem to have ruffled a feather or two here. I do not know the retail side of the wine business so I do not know what costs are consumed by inventory control efforts.

D. J.: You misunderstand. No feathers ruffled. None at all. I converse in this forum much as I would in person. Were we sitting in a room together I would speak the same way, but you would be able to interpret my level of voice, tone, atititude and body language and understand that I am not the least bit ruffled by anything you said.

And, heck, even if I was ruffled, you shouldn't worry about it, because it wouldn't be your fault...or your problem. Okay?

You make some good points. And in my previous responses, I wasn't really attempting to defend one side or the other, just pointing out some very real and practical matters that impinge on the issue. Things that may not occur to the common observer.

I think many (not all, but many) wines would definitely benefit from having single-vintage specific upc codes. Absolutely. As long as you've got a good system in effect for capturing and tracking those separate codes, it's an ideal system (keeping in mind no system will ever be ideal).

But what if you don't have a very good system? Or if someone just doesn't want to invest in same? Or if your system is only as good as the low-paid clerks that enter the information in the first place (human failure being the most common kind)?

When I started in this biz, it was all hand-tracked. And boy were mistakes made. Then it was main-frame based, and what went into the system was highly variable, so what was in the system was highly suspect. Then it was store-based. Now in many instances it's intranet, broadband, web accessed, ladidadida. And I can tell you: it's a hell of a lot better now than it ever was before, this inventory thing.

And still we have out-of-stocks.

Hoke,

The UPC thing always struck me as a bit of a hack. I know, RFID will change the world, etc. I always thought it would be ideal to have a code that would allow multiple SKUs for the same item. Vintages of wine, but maybe even down to the production run level. Computers are good at matching groups of numbers together.

The good news on the Wine Library front is that on Friday they updated their site and no longer have the wine listed as in stock. I guess they have a weekly update or something.

Walt

I agree, Walt. It's doable, sure enough.

Any decent winery nowadays has the capability (if they wish to exercise it) of instituting tracking procedures that are very complex.

Most larger wineries, for instance, given a code number on the bottle, can bactrack and tell you what day it was bottled, what batch it was, and what the constituent blends were; or they can provide all they salient figures regarding that bottling.

So, like I said, it's doable. If any one wants to do it.

For that matter, any credible retailer/restaurant now has the ability to hand-label at point of delivery any code they want to impose on the wine, said code including all the tracking information you want to attach to that code in your database. I was doing that...let's see.... 17 years ago at the retail level.

Regarding the Wine Library, yes, I expect you were the victim of a weekly data dump...as Robin alluded earlier in this thread, that's generally what passes for "real-time" inventory at most of these places. At least they did correct it.