Adventures In Wine Country

I never intended to become a spirits specialist. The opportunity just sort of fell into my lap while I was trying to learn more about wine. Like a million other people out there, I watched the film Sideways back in 2004 and was inspired by the romance of the industry, so I ended up working in a wine store instead of going to law school. Many of my colleagues at K&L during that era were similarly influenced, and we became lifelong friends.

That’s why, when heading up to the Santa Rita Hills on Wednesday morning, the cool morning air hitting my face as I brought my overnight bag to the car, my former K&L colleague Adam Parry (now currently my Chambers & Chambers agent) opened up the passenger side door and said to me: “Are you ready to get your Sideways on, mate?”

It’s been 17 years since that film came out, but the popularity of Pinot Noir has yet to slow down. The prices continue to rise, the demand never seems to cease, and the quality is only getting better. We were heading to the Central Coast to meet with a number of Pinot Noir specialists—namely The Hilt, Foxen, and Liquid Farm—but there’s a lot more happening in Southern California wine country these days beyond Pinot. Having spent very little time exploring the region myself, I was super excited about the next 48 hours.

Since moving to LA, I’ve made a concerted effort to expand my knowledge regarding the Santa Rita Hills and Santa Maria Valley AVAs, drinking more local wines over the last year than perhaps the previous five combined. My naivete, coupled with the evolution in the area over the last decade, have left some serious gaps in my wine knowledge that I was looking to fill, but they’ve also allowed for a number of revelations. When you’re confronted with unexpected brilliance, it’s always more exhilarating. Someone pours you a glass of Chardonnay, it blows your mind, and you exclaim: “Where the hell did that just come from?!!!”

Since returning yesterday evening, there’s a lot to tell you about, as well. The quick takeaways that I can give you are this:

  • I have no idea when I’ll ever buy a bottle of Napa wine again

  • I spent almost $600 of my own cash on winery exclusive single vineyard expressions that completely blew my mind

  • There’s so much real, honest, well-made wine between Happy Canyon, Ballard Canyon, and some of the lesser known areas still to explore, that it makes me want to turn right back around this evening and head back up for the weekend

  • We’ll be working immediately to source some of the harder-to-find wines directly from the producers starting today, so that you don’t have to drive up there yourself to find them

As to exactly what makes these wines so special, I need to find a few hours to really dig into the details and show you some incredible photos. Stay tuned.

-David Driscoll

Radian Vineyard

Earlier in the year, I tasted a Chardonnay from The Hilt that completely blew me away. It was salty, mineral, with blistering acidity, while simultaneously ripe, fleshy, and textural. I’d never tasted anything like it from California.

Obsessed with learning more, I began digging deeper into the source of all that flavor: Radian Vineyard, a treacherous vineyard on the far end of the Santa Rita Hills AVA, planted in chalky, silty, diatomaceous earth on the steep slopes of a giant wind tunnel that moves west to east off the Pacific Ocean.

I spent over an hour in the vineyard yesterday, sampling both Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wines from Radian, having my mind even further blown. I’ve never been anywhere like this in California, and I’ve never tasted wines like this from America.

More soon.

-David Driscoll

It Turns Out You Do Need People

Someone asked me the other day: why are more and more wine and whiskey retailers advertising pre-orders rather than in-stock items?

Simple answer: they’ve located new products to sell, they just don’t have them yet.

If there’s one thing people continue to spend money on in the COVID era, it’s booze. There’s nothing like a little retail therapy escapism to help get you through the day (and a little whiskey to get you through the night). E-commerce for wine and spirits has showed no signs of slowing down either. Since I started at Mission a year ago, our online sales have more than doubled. Granted, I’ve played a role in that, but it’s further proof that the demand exists.

Yet, if you read the news about Zillow this week, how they’ve had to stop buying houses due to a lack of manpower, it creates a clearer picture for the future of all e-commerce with the current supply chain issues. It turns out you can’t keep flipping houses if you start running out of remodeling supplies and manual labor, just like you can’t keep shipping bottles of alcohol without dock workers, truck drivers, and people to pack the boxes.

Despite our desire for limitless growth, there are indeed limits to the potential scale of e-commerce. Even if you have the capital to purchase more goods, and the connections to source new products, it’s all moot if there’s no one available to facilitate the supply chain.

And guess what? More and more people have decided they’re tired of being a cog in that machine. Talk to any retailer in the booze business and they’ll tell you the same thing: open positions are going unfilled, while longtime employees are walking out. Where will they go? Who knows? But if there’s one thing I’ve realized myself during the last two years, it’s that life is short and you have to make the most of what time you have left. In my humble opinion, we’re at the beginning of a budding blue color revolt, wrapped inside an existential crisis that—coupled with climate change—is going to define the upcoming decades.

Despite the shortage of workers, business owners and marketers continue to have tunnel vision. They don’t want to slow down, especially when the market continues to show signs of growth, so they continue to sell, even when they don’t have the product on hand or the means to take possession of it.

So, in short, start getting used to pre-orders and longer wait times for new products.

-David Driscoll

"How Much Are We Supposed To Spend To Stop People From Buying Our Products?"

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I’m going to gift all you non-NY Times subscribers this article right now so you can read about what bots have done to the sneaker industry.

Online retailers have to do more work to prevent the wrong people from buying their merchandise. Best quote from the article:

“It’s depressing to think about,” Mr. Gordon said. “At some point, you have to ask, ‘How much time are we supposed to spend to stop people from buying our products?’”

-David Driscoll

Impromptu Instagram Live with La Palina Cigars

Since I was lucky enough to have my good friend Matt Freerks in town this week, training the Mission staff on the makeup of a great cigar, I decided it was also a good idea to give our customers a bit of that experience, as well. We sell a TON of La Palina cigars at Mission because they’re fantastic products, but also because Matt is such an amazing educator. His passion for this industry is infectious, and I’ve learned more from him in the past year than anyone else about what is—without a doubt—the most exciting sector of the vice business right now.

-David Driscoll

Shadow Inflation in the Bourbon Industry

There was an article in the New York Times this week about what’s called “shadow inflation”: the idea that, even if prices aren’t going up, you’re not necessarily getting what you think you’re paying for given the decrease in quality or service.

The author, Neil Irwin, posits that the effects of inflation aren’t “just the prices you see and the numbers that are fed into economic models, or the news headlines and central bank inflation targets. It’s also that a given amount of spending buys experiences that are a little less satisfying, and that this adds up to an accumulation of frustrations that don’t necessarily show in the numbers.”

Now that I know there’s an actual term for this phenomenon, let’s talk about how shadow inflation has been rampant in the Bourbon industry for years.

One of the points that serious Bourbon enthusiasts like to bring up when confronted with price gouging at the retail level is the fact that Bourbon wholesale prices have remained relatively cheap compared to their market value. It’s a big reason the industry maintains such a loyal following.

Yet, because of those low wholesale prices and a lack of general availability, retail prices can fluctuate greatly. As an example, a bottle of Blanton’s should only cost you around $50+ or so given the standard retail mark-up over wholesale cost, but it might run you as much as $200 depending on where you shop.

When price gouging happens, Bourbon collectors blame the retailer for the greedy and unfair “inflation” on their favorite hard-to-find bottle. They know what the price should be, hence they know when someone is taking advantage of them.

But here’s what you might not know: American whiskey companies and their distributors have long been tying the purchase of other bulk spirits into the allocations of their most coveted labels, completely changing the investment requirement for a small retailer looking to carry an exciting selection of whiskies. Fifteen years ago, a retailer could order any Bourbon whenever they wanted it—no strings attached. Today, however, these bottles are packaged with a number of non-Bourbon products that most retailers don’t want and don’t need.

My question is: now that a case of allocated whiskey is tied to the purchase of an additional fifty cases of bulk spirits, what’s the real wholesale price of the bottle?

Granted, so long as the company can sell those additional bulk products for a profit in a reasonable amount of time, then the wholesale price is actually the price on the invoice. That’s why you see big box stores like Costco and Total Wine sticking to their standard mark-ups across the board. Absorbing a large drop of bulk goods is no issue for them, as they have the traffic to move those bottles.

But for a smaller retailer, tying up dollars in inventory that doesn’t move just to get six bottles of a rare American whiskey doesn’t necessarily add up. Hence, the retail prices you’ll find in their establishments often reflect that additional investment cost. While I can’t speak for all small retailers, I can say for certain that what some Bourbon customers consider price gouging is often times just the Bourbon industry’s own version of shadow inflation.

So why don’t Bourbon companies just raise their prices to reflect the market demand? Because raising your prices makes customers angry, which is the root cause of shadow inflation covered in the article. As Irwin writes: “Many types of businesses facing supply disruptions and labor shortages have dealt with those problems not by raising prices, but by taking steps that could give their customers a lesser experience.”

From a marketing perspective, it’s much easier to keep your wholesale prices the same, and force retailers to purchase additional products to help grow sales companywide. That way customers will continue to sing the praises of the blue-collar American Bourbon industry and their commitment to the common man, while demonizing the retailers who succumb to the perils of Bourbon’s own shadow inflation issue, ruining it for customers who are just trying to pay an honest price.

In my personal opinion, it’s a chicken shit way of dealing with the issue because it puts the blame on small business owners who are simply responding to the rules laid down by the producers and their distributors. I’m not a fan of price gouging, nor will I ever defend it, but if more consumers knew what was required from a purchasing perspective to secure even the tiniest allocation of rare Bourbon today, it would make their heads spin.

-David Driscoll

High & Low

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I’m a big proponent of what’s called high/low fashion; the idea of combining something luxurious or expensive with something basic and simple.

As an example, I might wear a pair of grey Vans with an Armani suit jacket. Or I might wear a Rolex with a pair of Levi’s and a baseball hat. When done well, there’s no better juxtaposition, but it requires confidence. Many folks who spend money on clothes don’t really understand fashion, so they just go for the high end, ignoring the low. They buy the most expensive stuff out there and let the labels do the talking, figuring: if I’m wearing Gucci, I must look good, right?

High/low fashion works for food and booze, too! As an example, my wife and I went out for dinner this past Sunday at Firefly in Studio City, where we drank fancy cocktails, fancy wine, and ate filet mignon. However, rather than get dessert, my wife mentioned she had been dying to try the new mini tacos from Jack in the Box. Maybe we could hit the drive-thru on Laurel Canyon on the way home?

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Having not really scratched my frites itch, I threw in a large fries order, as well. We were all dressed up, full of fine drink and cuisine, munching on tiny tacos and greasy potato strings as we cruised down Magnolia on the way back to Burbank. I highly, highly recommend the new Jack in the Box mini tacos, especially since you can order mild, hot, or extra hot. They were the perfect end to a fantastic evening.

High/low booze? Champagne and potato chips, y’all. A classic. I recommend doing that as often as possible.

Whisky and chocolate is another good one. I once drank a 30 year old Port Ellen with a bag of M&Ms.

Fancy Bordeaux with a Tommy’s burger. I’ve done that at least ten times this year. Fancy Burgundy with Cane’s chicken fingers. Done that, too.

Most people always look to pair high end with high end, which is also fun. But it’s not always necessary. Don’t be afraid to mix it up. The greatest highs are usually accompanied by the greatest lows, in my opinion—in a positive way, in this case.

-David Driscoll