$2 Milk and $750 Wine

The Wall Street Journal reports that a Barossan shiraz is now Australia’s most expensive wine, at about $750 a bottle, or $1 per millilitre. Torbreck’s The Laird, 2005 vintage. Apparently all 400 cases have sold out. Quite a lot of it went to Hong Kong, where the wine’s importer commented “All the big collectors in Hong Kong, they’re not idiots, they know what they’re drinking, they know what they’re buying, and they love wine.” Or commodities.

Everyone – and maybe even the Wall Street Journal – reports that supermarket-branded milk is now $2 per three litre container, or $0.00067 a millilitre. Using this information one can clearly demonstrate the agricultural and economic differences between a cow in a paddock and a shiraz vine in a vineyard: volumetrically it’s 99.93 cents per millilitre, to the cow’s disadvantage. Thank goodness therefore for the two over-arching truisms of economics: markets correct themselves, and competition is good. But you don’t see a lot of milking cows in economics lectures, do you…

Yet these are piffling matters when one considers the crimes against humanity being committed by other arms of the supermarket gods. A chain of wine stores bought quite a lot of Penfold’s Bin 389 – or ‘Baby Grange’ as it is known, thanks to the fact it is only a tenth as awful as Grange proper. They then proceeded to sell it below the wholesale price they bought it for. This loss-leader mechanism is designed to increase foot traffic in one’s store, thus capitalizing on impulse purchases of products with more positively geared profit margins. Yet the man from Penfold's who runs the Bin 389 spreadsheet was not amused. He thought that this discounting would damage the integrity of Bin 389's brand. (What effect it might have on the integrity of Bin 389's quality as wine is all together another, less important matter.) He immediately instructed his staff to stop updating their facebook pages and go forth charged with company credit cards and buy up all the loss-leader Bin 389. What a decision it must have been for the staff: ‘Do I stop facebooking myself, or do I use the company credit card?’ Well they used the credit cards and bought back about a tenth of their stock at a price lower than they’d sold the stock to the wine store chain in the first place. Admittedly the economics are revolutionary, but this is cleary a win for the wine store chain.

It is not an original idea, however. This outstandingly innovative business concept mirrors that of many of Mr. Penfold’s grape suppliers, who, of course, are only to happy to sell Mr. Penfold and his friend Mr. Foster wine grapes at below-cost-of-production prices. It is the future of business and through it we might all yet be saved. There’s such romance and moral purity found in wine.

Where The Flavour Is

Volume 49 of the Chamber's Winery newsletter has just landed. It contains sad news for sherry connoisseurs:

Our sincere apologies, particularly for our long time customers, if you missed this in our last edition but our Dry Flor Sherry is now only available in 750ml bottles. We no longer supply either flagons or containers. We fully understand the impact of this decision…

On the other hand the newsletter lifted any true gourmet’s heart with this recipe:

Cross cut a whole Camembert Cheese and soak in our Mt Carmel Port overnight in the fridge. Return to room temperature then add 125g of butter, beat then pat back into the original circle shape and encrust with flaked almonds. Serve with drinks.

Forget the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival Hydra, and forget little half bottles of Manzanilla, and forget Fair-Trade wafers topped with an artisinal anchovy fillet and a dob of tomato concasse, Chambers is where the flavour is.

Making Proper Use Of Sommeliers

The new year started extremely well, with the following advice about sommelier use coming from the 1st of January's edition of my favourite piece of right-wing fruit-cakery, The Spectator.

My wife would like to get angry and throw a glass of wine over me; what would you recommend?

We can now all return to restaurants with confidence. What fools we have been in 2010 and further back, asking sommeliers moronic questions about food and wine matching.