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…

Today, we find ourselves the victims of our own “price check” feature. We had to pick a few items up at Costco, and as is our habit, we also perused the wine aisles. Sadly, we found ourselves in the position of Whole Foods, seeing one item in common with Costco that we’re far from competitive on from a price perspective. In fact, Costco not offers a better price. They offer a much, much, much better price. Like, ridiculously good. What some wine stores might bill in email blasts as “an out-and-out steal” worthy of a “five case buy!” Read more…

We brought this wine in recently, and are happy to be able to offer it at a fairly competitive price ($22.99 a bottle, which is just slightly north of the prices at other Southern California stores such as Wine House and The Wine Country). Ideally, we’d like to be able to match these prices, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way. But because we’re so enamored of this wine, we chose to bring it in anyhow, and we’re very happy with the decision.

Also, we knew from research that we were offering the wine in the lower end of the price spectrum, having seen it on Wine-Searcher for up to $30 a bottle. But when we happened to see it at Whole Foods this weekend, during a grocery shopping/wine espionage excursion, we were left scratching our heads. At Whole Foods, the wine retails for $36.99 a bottle.

THIRTY-SIX-NINETY-NINE! That’s a good 23% over the highest price listing on Wine-Searcher, and 80% higher than the lowest priced SoCal retailer carrying the bottle. We also noticed that the Telmo Rodriguez Dehesa Gago Toro 2005 is back up to $15.99 a bottle there, but that’s another story… Read more…