Usually when I go to Bristol Farms and peruse the wine section I experience sticker shock, since the prices there are anywhere from 10% to 30% above typical retail mark-up. Today, I experienced shock for the opposite reason. Some of my favorite wines of late are on sale there at incredibly fair prices — prices that verge upon or meet wholesale levels (and, which, in fact, might very well be a mistake).

Rush to the Bristol Farms at Beverly Boulevard and Doheny in Beverly Hills to pick up the 2006 LIOCO Indica Red for $13.99 a bottle, or the 2007 LIOCO Rosé of Pinot Noir/Carignane for $9.99 a bottle. Both have signage indicating that they’re on sale for $3 off the normal pricing of $16.99 and $13.99 respectively; however, the LIOCO MSRP on each is actually $19.99 and $16.99, and it’s likely that somebody with the price gun screwed up and marked them down an extra $3 each. The 2007 Sonoma County Chard is correctly marked at $19.99. I don’t know if they’re similarly marked at other Bristol Farms locations.

I sell the Indica for $20 and the Rosé for $16 and already think they’re a steal. So, for once (and perhaps once only) I’m going to suggest you buy wine from Bristol Farms.

I’ve had a lousy day. Between my car being towed from the Jack In the Box lot next to my office building (I know, I shouldn’t have parked there!) and site traffic dropping back to normal pre-InStyle-blurb levels, it’s been reality-check-filled.

So I can tell you I wasn’t in the mood to find that I’d run out of 6-bottle shippers (props go to InStyle for the very welcome and unanticipated boost in business!). On top of this, my supplier is on a mini-vacation until sometime next week. Oops.

Not wanting to drive all the way to my usual back-up source for shippers, I decided to stop by a wine shop to pick up some shippers to tide me over, on my way back to the office from the impound lot. But I was dismayed at the price I found: $9 for a six-pack. I left, empty-handed, and figured I’d get them cheaper elsewhere. Read more…

I’d been planning to price check a couple of Chateauneuf-du-Papes I saw the other day at Bristol Farms. But those can wait, since I happened upon the bargain of the week today and thought you should know about it.

On close-out at The Wine Hotel on West 3rd Street in LA you’ll find a scant three bottles of the 2006 Lang & Reed Cabernet Franc, for a mere $9.95 a bottle. Beats our price by a long shot. Apparently it’s not to the taste of the new owners, along with some Mollydooker and some other wines that are priced Crazy-Eddie-low.

You can call the Wine Hotel at 323-937-9463 to snare these. Though, honestly, your chances are better if you show up to the 5800 West Third Street location in LA to pick these up in person, as they’re not really set up for phone orders (yet).

Oh, since this is a Price Check…here’s what others (including us) sell this for:

Wine Library: $18/bottle (damn you, Gary Vaynerchuk!)

Wine House: $20/bottle

d547: $23/bottle (drat! It’s Caronne-Ste-Gemme all over again)

Englewood Wine Merchant: $25/bottle

We haven’t done a Price Check for a while, and we’re coming back with a doozy. We spotted what should be two Spanish budget wines at Whole Foods this afternoon. And by budget we mean one digit, excluding decimal places.

Why we’re surprised that they were marked up unreasonably at Whole Foods, we don’t know. Maybe we were simply hoping that there’d be something at Whole Foods with a simple Local Wine Store (LWS) mark-up, since we know many of you shop there, even for wine (tsk, tsk).

The two wines we saw were both imports care of Jorge Ordonez: Read more…