Saturday, June 23, 2018

"Shop Local" Only Goes So Far

For a decade-plus, now, we've bought wines from Northgate Vineyard. Today, I'm reasonably certain that I bought my last bottle of wine from them. It's a shame, really, because I really liked doing business with them. Unfortunately, times change and, too frequently, the things that make you want to do business with people go away as part of that change. 

Such has happened with Northgate. Earlier this year they were sold. Apparently, the buyer is someone that's buying up Virginia vineyards, presumably hoping to cash in on a stong "buy local" ethos that has powered the growth of the farmers markets, distilleries and the Virginia wine industry as a whole. Unfortunately, this buyer seems to want to recover his acquisition costs inside of the first 12-24 months of assuming ownership.

While I'm a proponent of "buy local", that desire has its limits. Admittedly, when we first started buying their wines a decade ago, they were a relative bargain: you could get a really decent wine from really nice people and spend well less than $20 to do so. Even over time, as their prices trended upward, the value proposition still made their wine an "ok" buy. Unfortunately, a wine that was a bargain at $16 and an ok value at $21 falls out of the "every-day drinking" price-range when it hits $30+. And, when the retail price goes up by more than 60% in the space of three months and you no longer cut frequent-buyers the same discount you cut for occasional case-buyers, you're really asking a lot of your existing customers. I'm concerned with value. If you're wanting to charge me better than 60% more for something I've been buying for years, you need to deliver a product that has a concordant improvement in value.

Funny thing with a better-than-$30 bottle of wine: you put it into the same price-class as some really decent "continental" or California wines. Yeah, you're still nowhere near the really superior wines that come from vineyards that have been making wine since before this country even existed, but you're definitely out of the "table wine" price category and into "special occasion" territory. You're no longer a wine that I'm just going to give to a newly moved-in neighbor as a housewarming gift. You're no longer a wine that I'm going to share with friends who are just as happy drinking a bottle of Barefoot from the local 7Eleven. And, hey: if you're able to make more money chasing the "occasional wines" market than the "every day wines" market, then "good on you" ...but I can't come along for that ride. And, like I say, if you're going to price yourself as an occasional wine, you need to taste like one. Sadly, I can't say that Northgate's wines fall into that category.

What's really sad is that they aren't the local wine-producer that's going down this path. Yes, Northern Virginia (DC Metro as a whole) has a lot of six-figure earning residents. And, of those, there's a non-trivial number — particularly the younger, less life-encumbered ones — who tend to have a "more dollars than sense" outlook on buying-decisions. But, that's a group that tends to shrink over time as they discover that there's plenty of things that are "just as good or better for less" and that spending money for the sake of spending money isn't really a sustainable path, no matter what your income is.

Point of fact, my income doesn't exactly put me in the "struggling" range, even given this area's cost of living. That said, I still measure everything I buy — no matter the price — on whether the reward was worth the cost. My spending habits are more about value than raw price. I've had "special occasion" meals that, at nearly $1000, were far better values than meals that were well less than 1/3 that price.

And that's the rub. "Shop local" is really only one point of consideration in the "value" equation. There's not many people I know that are going to completely ignore the rest of the value equation just to shop local. If people are going to ignore other aspects of a value equation, they're going to do it for a status-y "name", not "it's local". To be brutally honest, I don't know that there's a single Virginia winery that has a status-y enough name to overcome normal value equations.

It really makes me wonder how successful this vineyard-buyer is going to end up being. His practices, to date, have been pretty alienating. I've even spoken to a wine-buyer for a local wine outlet that has previously carried the labels effected by this vinyard-buyer's actions. And the opinion is basically the same as mine: "nice when it was at last year's price; completely not worth it at the current price."  Worse, that buyer has to factor in seller-behaviors into the bulk-buying decisions and the seller's delivery-behavior has apparently suffered even as the asking-prices have soared.

So, "good-bye, Northgate." It was nice when it was Mark selling me wine. This new guy can go screw himself ...because that's exactly what he's trying to do to the people that helped make Northgate an attractive acquisition-target.

Friday, June 22, 2018

Do People Just Look Younger, Now?

So... Facebook popped up a picture of me from my college days. While the specific picture was of me heading out to a Halloween party (probably the Friday before Halloween, 1989), there's nothing I'm wearing in the picture (aside from the small bit of makeup and the bleach-blotted, semi-shredded jeans) that weren't part of my regular look.



At any rate, couldn't remember if I still had the original photo anywhere. It's possible that I do, just have no freaking clue where. But, it did exist in a "Photos from College" folder on one of my cloud accounts. It was actually one of only three photos of me from the entire time I was in college. There's probably  more, but none that were ever in my possession. Basic fact is that there's just not a lot of pictures of me from any point in time as I generally eschew picture-taking.

At any rate, of those photos of my college friends, while everyone pictured looks noticeably younger, none seem to look as young as the college-aged faces I tend to see walking around, today. I dunno whether it's just that I tended to hang out with people that looked older than typical or if my brain is still applying the same filters to those pictures as it formed when I was seeing those faces with regularity (but doesn't to people who are actually 18-22 years old). Could be just a weird perceptual trick ...much like how pictures of former SOs no longer look as beautiful as you remembered them looking when you were still in the good part of when you were dating them.