BevMo

In wine circles, there is little mention of BevMo! or Beverages and More as they used to be known. This chain has 100 stores in Calif and Ariz, each of which is around 10,000 sq feet (guess who visited the "About Us" page). The NorCal stores I've been to have solid selection with perhaps 500-1500 different wines to choose from. In this competitve wine market, their regular prices are non-compelling for a major wine distributor, but their sales can be very good, but you have to be on your toes to catch these.

So why isn't BevMo! a serious wine contender? Let me count thy flaws.

Prices are high, considering there is Costco, Trader Joes, and many wine specialists including The Wine Club, K & L Wines, Beltramos, to name some of the major ones, all with better prices. Their sales prices can be very good, but there is game playing sometimes. BevMo has a 2 for 1 sale periodically (technically get the second bottle for $0.05), but they jack up the price of the first bottle by a bit.

Wilfred Wong or WW. He is their resident wine rater, and his scores seem dubious. There is no mention of how he rates the wines, namely does he taste blind. His scores are regularly 2-5 points higher than the Wine Spectator and worse still he rates some mediocre wines qute highly. E.g. the Snoqualmie 2007 Riesling Columbia is WW 91 and WS 88. The Zolo 2008 Torrontes is WW 92 and WS 84 (I'm not 100% sure these are the exact same bottlings).

They lie. They list "retail prices" and then their discount price. But the retail price can be made up. Case in point, the Palo Alto 2007 Red Blend Muale Valley is listed at $20 retail and $13 at BevMo. But $13 is the suggested retail price. BTW, WS's Matt Kramer and others liked this wine quite a bit.

Wilfred Wong's rating scale is completely whacked. Here is how the latest postal mailing explains his 100 point scale:

• 93-100: Ageworthy, with the potential to improve over 20 years
• 90-92: Exemplifies precise varietal character, tremendous concentration and superior balance
• 87-89: Shows excellent varietal character
• 85-86: Shows very good varietal character
• 80-84: Shows very good varietal character, but lacks some concentration

First, age worthiness is conflated with quality. This scale makes the moronic assumption, that anything ageworthy is better than anything not. But really, which is better a 93 point ageworthy bottle or a 90 pointer, by this scale? Or if there is a tough, tannic wine that will get better over 5 years to become mediocre, then this gets 93+ points, right?

And what's with this varietal character bit on everything. If there is a rich plush pinot noir as some of the top cult pinot's are, then it gets an 85 or less, because it doesn't express classic pinot varietal character.

The bottom line is his scale does not represent the bottom line quality of the wine. A higher score in the below 92 point range just means more "varietal character", whatever that means. I'm not sure how complexity, spiciness, earthiness, acidity or tannins would fold in.

Because BevMo is a big chain, they don't carry many lower volume wines, with say less than 3,000 cases. So it's hard to find those interesting wines.

The emphasis is on US wines with a pretty decent domestic wine selection. The sections on French, Italian and Australian is poor with only big volume names. The Spanish and South American sections are as good as the competition.