Up to now the San Diego Wine Storage blog has focused on linking our readers to articles and other wine blogs that we think will interest the serious wine enthusiast and collector.  Now we want to do something different.

All of us at SDWS fall in to the “serious wine enthusiast and collector” category (ask our wives and our bankers) and we spend most of our days schmoozing with like-minded wine addicts at our wine storage facilities in San Diego and Solana Beach.  We talk about where they buy their wines, how they store them at home and in our facilities, and how they serve them to make sure their precious bottles show their best when they pop the cork.

So why not share this compendium of knowledge with our readers???

In this 3-part series we will examine the critical phases of enjoying wine:  buying, storing, and serving.  We will go beyond the basics and will share insights we get from our members, all of whom take all three of these phases VERY seriously.

Part I—Buying Wine in the Digital Age

The Online Buying Phenomenon:  Online wine sellers have mushroomed over the past decade, from small brick and mortar retailers augmenting walk-in sales to mega-sites like wine.com that carry thousands of selections and vintages from around the world.  The best of these sites are easy to navigate, have real-time inventory, and ship your wine safely and efficiently.  Yes, you will have to add shipping costs to the equation, but if you can’t find the wine you want locally this is a good option to consider.  And you let your fingers do the walking.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t watch-outs.  A few important things to keep in mind:

• Phantom Inventory:  You’re more likely to find this at smaller brick and mortar retailers who also sell wine online, but it happens with some of the big guys too.  They run out of a wine and then don’t update their website.  The worst scenario is that they accept your order and then only ship you the wines they have on the shelf.  Solution:  shop at sites with real-time inventory.
• Vintage bait & switch:  They run out of the wine you ordered and ship you a different vintage.  Bad bad.
• Unclear or unsafe shipping policies:  Every reputable online wine seller clearly defines their shipping policies and prices.  Some won’t ship during periods of extreme weather, which protects you and your wine.  Many offer to store your order free of charge in climate controlled conditions until it’s OK to ship. (This can be a bonus as it allows you to consolidate several orders into one shipment.) Make sure your wine isn’t shipped late in the week where it may be stored in someone’s warehouse over the weekend.  Best practice is to select guaranteed express overnight or 2-day shipping where they ship your wines on one of the first three days of the week.
• A grownup needs to sign:  No common carrier shipping wine can deliver the goods unless someone 21 or over signs for it.  If no one is home who qualifies the wine goes back on the truck and trundles around town for the remainder of the day and then is put back into the shipper’s warehouse.  Remember heat kills wine and precious few shippers offer refrigerated trucks or warehouses, so you and your wine are exposed.  You can have the wine delivered to your office but turning your workplace into a mini-warehouse might raise a few eyebrows.  If you store your wine with San Diego Wine Storage we can sign for your shipments and then put the wine directly in your private locker or hold it for you until you drop by to add the new arrival to your collection.
• You may be able to get it locally:  If your local retailer doesn’t carry the wine you are looking for ask them to order it for you.  They may be able to find it from one of their suppliers and you won’t have to pay shipping costs.  Also many local retailers have websites where you can purchase wine online and have them hold your order for pickup.

So which online sellers do we recommend you try?  In a previous post we linked our readers to a Forbes article listing prominent online wine sellers.  To these we would add the following California-based companies:

• jjbuckley.com
• klwines.com
• benchmarkwine.com
• whwc.com (Woodland Hills Wine Co.)
• rarewineco.com
• wallywine.com

Shop Local!  Perhaps the best resource you have is a knowledgeable, helpful local retailer who takes the time to find out what you like and then recommends interesting wines that suit your palate.  New to wine?  Find a retailer you like and get him or her to recommend 6 to 12 bottles of wine within your price range.  After you have tried them all go back and tell your salesperson what you liked.  This is a good way to start a relationship that can grow as your taste in wine develops.  To our mind it’s much less risky than trusting online wine critics or bloggers who have no insight into what you like and whose taste in wine might be completely different from yours.

Winery Direct Sales:  Ordering direct from your favorite wineries has its advantages.  First of all you don’t have to worry about provenance—that is, where the wine spent its life before you bought it—and second you are usually guaranteed an allocation of high demand, hard to find new releases.

Before Robert Parker and other wine critics started handing out 95+ scores like they were jujubes there was a select handful of California Cult Wine Producers whose mailing lists were harder to get on than the guest list for the Oscars.  And once you made it on the list you dared not refuse your allocation for fear of being bumped off the list.

That’s changed and now almost all mailing lists are open to new customers.  And if you’re not sure you want to buy the full allocation, you can try to find someone to share with you.  At SDWS our members are able to sign in to our online wine forum and post offers to share allocations with other members.  When you reach out to more than two hundred kindred spirits you stand a good chance of finding someone who will climb on board.

Next:  Protecting Your Investment—Store Wisely