Accidental Wine Company

Interesting. You specify 3, 6, or 12 bottles from 1 of 3 price ranges and your color preference and you get what they get. The website has list of recent "mishaps". Why do I never get ideas like this?

Link to Trib article about them.

Accidents happen, the people at the Accidental Wine Company like to say. Good thing for them that they do, too, or the Accidental Wine Company would be out of business.

Every time a delivery person, a vintner or wine distributor drops a case of wine and one bottle breaks, staining all the others, the sound heard in the minds of the people at Accidental Wine is not that of glass shattering. It's more like the "ka-ching" of a cash register going off.

Accidental Wine rushes in and buys up the remaining blemished but otherwise unbroken bottles that a retailer won't touch. Then it resells them over the Internet for a third to half off the price.

Then there was the Argentinian winemaker that produced 150 cases of a pinot noir before noticing someone had spelled it Pinor Noir on all the labels. Bob Castellani, president of importer-distributor Specialty Cellars quickly put in a call to Accidental Wine, which scooped up the bottles and resold them, with a note to consumers that it really was pinot noir they were getting.

"It worked for them, it worked for us and it certainly worked for their clients, who got some great deals," Castellani said of Accidental. The company, he added, is the only one he knows of in its niche market.

Because Accidental, like Forrest Gump with his box of chocolates, never knows what it is going to get, consumers who buy through its Web site can't order specific brands of wine. But they can specify what kind of wine they want, a chardonnay, for example, or a merlot. Likewise, if they hate zinfandel or chianti reminds them of that creepy scene in "Silence of the Lambs," they can say so and they won't get any.

Some wine stores sell damaged bottles at big discounts. One store that I shop at regularly has an aisle of bin ends, closeouts, damaged bottles, etc. Just recently I bought a few bottles of a $20 wine for $10 each. The labels were all stained from one bottle breaking. Interestingly, I had put a couple of the $20 bottles in my cart and a salesman said "that same exact wine is $10 in the closeout/damaged aisle".

I'm just wondering what the cost of reprinting labels, vs. effectively dumping the wine are... It seems a nice story IYKWIM

regards

Ian

Some wine stores sell damaged bottles at big discounts. One store that I shop at regularly has an aisle of bin ends, closeouts, damaged bottles, etc. Just recently I bought a few bottles of a $20 wine for $10 each. The labels were all stained from one bottle breaking. Interestingly, I had put a couple of the $20 bottles in my cart and a salesman said "that same exact wine is $10 in the closeout/damaged aisle".

All too often, those wines being offered at huge discount may have been damaged in a far more profound way: heat damage. For that reason, wine consumers should always be wary of heavily discounted wines unless they know the retailer and their reasons for the discount.

Mark Lipton

With Mark's timely caveat emptor firmly in mind, I would be leery of such apparent windfalls of fortune too.

And that comes from being ITB, and having processed and dealt with each tier of the business and how they handle such things.

AWC sounds like it might be a decent proposition---until you realize that in the natural course of things, it is well nigh impossible to select out those bottles that are label-stained only from bottles with other problems.

It is common practice for a retailer to take the line of least resistance, which is either 1)refuse the case and return it to the distributor with credit if necessary, or 2) put the stained/scuffed/torn label on discount to get rid of it.

Distributors, when they get return bottles, will always....always...charge these back to the supplier. The supplier is then, by directive and in many cases legally bound to destroy these bottles they have just paid for. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don't. Sometimes the distributor/supplier will use stained bottles for purposes of sampling; sometimes they will offer it to restaurants as house pour items where they won't be displaying the bottles anyway. Sometimes they simply take it home and drink it themselves.

But Mark is correct: I would not trust AWC to sell only sound bottles...because I couldn't be sure of their inspection and verification process. And I certainly wouldn't trust retailers and distributors to scrupulously govern themselves and not try to include some otherwise off bottles in the mix. And I'm willing to bet just about anything that AWC has a firm policy of "no refunds, no returns".

So, nope, not going there.

Besides the very legitimate concerns Mark and Hoke raised (ok, so the label is stained from a different bottle- but did that bottle break, or leak because it was 107 degrees in the container?) the other issue is you have no choice re what you are given (besides saying you don't like Chianti or Zin or whatever). Hey, there's a lot of wines I don't like (sure, I'm an easy grader, with lots of Bs, but I chose wines I think I'll like).Here's a list of some wines they've done in the past:
http://www.accidentalwine.com/examples.html
this is the ones they chose to advertize! You'd really need to discount 03 Laboure-Roi to about $5 to interest me, and some of those wines seem to me to already be $5 wines (Screw Kappa,Fat Bastard, etc). I like Bordeaux, but 02 satellite RB? Sure, I'd take a chance on the 04 Lisini Rosso or 02 Mugneret (is this Georges/M-Giibourg, methinks there's another Mugneret out there) Vosne if price was right. But the $101 for 3 price isn't so attractive, especially if I'm just as likely to get Dominique Laurent Fixin!

wine consumers should always be wary of heavily discounted wines unless they know the retailer and their reasons for the discount. Mark Lipton

I agree. In this case I know the person well.

... or leak because it was 107 degrees in the container!

I've always been told that all containers are refrigerated!

OF COURSE I DON'T REALLY BELIEVE THAT!!

We will choose from a variety of wines with blemished labels that restaurants, wine stores, supermarkets and hotels don’t want to sell for that very reason. - Accidental Wine Company

If blemished labels are the only criteria for selection, I would feel more comfortable signing up. Some of the wording on their website indicates that wines maybe inlcuded for other reasons.

A soiled, retired, or discontinued label is suddenly and simply less valuable. - Accidental Wine Company

It seems the criteria quoted above may open the door to more questionable wines. I would not want them to ship me a wine that they know carries a high risk of oxidization. Say that they sampled three bottles from a lot and found one to be oxidized. I would hope that the entire batch would go into the dumpster. But would it?

We have taken advantage of bottles damaged at our local wine shop in the past, but we always knew the provenance of the damage. I have also purchased wine that was damaged in hurricane Katrina. In that case I simply took a gamble and was willing to accept the risk. It is not quite clear to me where The Accidental Wine company is on the risk continuum.