“Shelf turds…”
That sentence opener gets repeated a lot in wine shops and what follows is rarely ever good. It’s an insider term that occupies that same dyspeptic niche as Score Whores, and Cherry-Pickers, when wine sales tradespeople get together to drink and bitch.
Put simply, a shelf turd is any wine that the shop owners buys but then can’t sell. It can literally be ANYTHING. If the shop has six bottles of Chateau Haut-Brion, sell two and then watch the other four gather dust for years after, that $750 per bottle (a conservative estimate) wine has become a shelf turd. There are very knowledgeable wine people who will make a persuasive argument for the idea that ultra-premium wines cannot become rack rats, as they are built to age and are just amassing value as they sit…well, okay, BUT the bottom-line fact is that retail wine shops use cash flow as their lifeblood and anything which clogs up that artery is a Problem. At very least, it is business capital tied up in something which is not pulling its weight, so your best efforts to move those four are required and pronto.
From the customer’s end – more repeat customers than the endless parade of casuals – those bottles eventually become wallpaper, seen but not really, eventually accreting the stink of rejection. During my years in retail, the wines seen below were some of my most notorious shop orphans…
What do all these wines have in common?
Every single one of ’em is an EXCEPTIONAL wine. Not just, IMO, but universally regarded thus.
Here’s yer super-bargain Hot Take for the summer of ’23: Walk into that wine shop, next time, and really look at any bottle which doesn’t appear familiar. In many cases, it’s been there a while and you ceased to pick it out of the crowd. MANY shelf turds get a price reduction, a little sticker grease aimed at getting it the hell out the door. These are, without exaggeration, some of the best values you will ever run across in wine. Do this especially in non-specialty stores which sell wine but don’t focus on it.
When I lived on Bainbridge Island, a “suburb” of Seattle that lies straight across Elliott Bay from downtown Sea-patch, I was in the midst of dire existential Dilemma: I was in a serious Amarone Phase and that was in open warfare with my being a total cheap-ass. Amarone, even then, was and is Not Cheap. $100 a bottle is fairly common; good ones can run ya $150 – $200. One of my most sought after was Masi Campolongo di Torbe, a glorious bottle which originally evoked what has been my most quoted phrase from The Pour Fool: “The wine they’d serve at God’s wedding.” It was running a very reasonable $75 a bottle. Which made my wallet vibrate and slam shut like the gate of Hell.
One lazy Saturday, I wandered into the local Safeway, absolutely one of those markets in which wine is strictly a convenience for the clientele, and was idly perusing the shelves when I saw the Campolongo label. I sighed heavily and cursed the Universe which was, I felt, rubbing my nose in my penury. Then I glanced down at the price tag and felt like someone has shoved a cattle prod up my fundamental orifice. IT WAS $19.99 A BOTTLE!! I hesitated: this is one of those things where I carry something to the checkout and they scan it and say, “Oh, this price isn’t right...” and then we do the whole tedious thing about honoring your posted price, which IS a consideration for most businesses but not so much as Safeway, that mammoth grocery juggernaut which WILL, in every case down to and including candy bars, just tell me to screw myself and either pay the actual price or Piss Off. So, I surreptitiously removed the little shelf tag and called a clerk over. “Can you scan this?” I asked, “I don’t see a price anywhere.”
She did and said, “$19.99.” Not even a hint of uncertainty on her face, no clue that this wine could and maybe should, at Safeway’s bloated standard mark-up, sell for about $90. To her, it was just one more PLU that someone had forgotten to tag…And the world titled on its axis a bit, just for me.
There were six bottles. After I replaced the shelf tag, I went and got a carrier basket, put all six in it, and went through the checkout. $132.46. SOLD. They even got me a six-bottle box from the back and I called a cab. I went home and put all six into my wine fridge, opened something less precious, and toasted my great fortune.
Six shelf turds. And that IS what they were, my own geeky ecstasy aside, because they were bottles they could not sell and this is Safeway, where there is no rationalization about “improving on the shelf” or “appreciating in value”, and They Had To Go. The person who generated the $19.99 price tag probably did see the wholesale price (roughly $65, at the time) but looked at the date the store purchased them and how long they had squatted there, producing no $$$, and just shrugged and said “Fuck it“, put them on close-out, took the loss, and went on to checking shelf dates on apple butter.
The term itself, as every wine steward anywhere knows, has no relationship at all to the quality of the wine. The Villa Bonomi and Man O’ War pictured above were highly-rated items from atypical sources – the Italian Marche for the Bonomi, the southern tip of New Zealand for the Man O’ War “Dreadnought”, a titanic Syrah from a nation which, so every expert said, could not produce a grape like Syrah because of its cool climate – and were products of my own uber-wonky obsession with digging up great wines that nobody else knows about and shoving them into the zeitgeist, sometimes with a small bulldozer. They could be almost counted on to sell slowly or not at all. Bu the rest were widely celebrated stuff that got gaudy ratings and were sought-after…just not by my customers, apparently. Sure, we had obscure bottles that were NOT exceptional but merely drinkable and some of those were shelf turds, too. But the phenomenon this post is about is What Fell Through The Cracks. And they ARE, absolutely, Out There and some are near you.
Lack of notoriety is what creates most Rack Dreck and that is far more of a contemporary Thang than it was back when I started in the retail wine trade (as opposed to writing about and studying it and buying for restaurants), in 1994, when there were just simply a TON fewer wines available. Today is sorta the ideal growth medium for breeding new shelf turds and some retailers, specialty wine purveyors at least, now just refuse to reduce ’em or close them out and just let ’em sit, squatting there in their magnificent oblivion, unowned and unloved and overlooked. They will, if they’re smart and they have enough stock or can work their distributors for a free bottle, do tastings of them and feature the wines in their promotions. At our old shop, we did a semi-yearly Wine Adoption event, tag-lined “What is The Flavor of Loneliness?”, at which all these bottles were gathered and placed on a table and marked down a bit, 10 to 15%. And we poured a few. And they sold.
Bottom Line: If a wine sits for six months, a year, or longer, it is no indication whatsoever of the wine’s quality. It MAY, in fact, be an indicator that this particular bottle is a wine to which you should give special attention. It’s OFTEN about awareness and lack thereof or, in the case of Washington and California and other wine-intensive states, plain ol’ Homerism. It can also be a formerly hot wine or brand that has faded a bit and is now passé among the notoriously trendy American wine culture. When we ran our shop, the Australian winery, Mollydooker, was so sought-after, we were limited to six bottles only that we were allowed to sell. Now, you can find Mollydooker at good supermarket wine departments. After Chateau St. Jean’s “Cinq Cepages” won Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year designation, back in 1998-ish, you couldn’t find their wines – any of ’em – for a solid year. Now, St. Jean is sold in Grocery Outlet.
You can be the beneficiary of this schizoid retail dynamic. Read the wine trades, once in a while, check ratings but especially the texts accompanying them. If you love wine, Be Aware. And be vigilant. There is probably a wine value out there with you name on it; maybe even a Steal.
Happy hunting!
The Pour Fool 