One-stop shopping. What a wonderful, uniquely American concept.
In the old days
– and even today in Europe – shopping involves visiting
different merchants for different commodities: the proverbial
butcher, baker and candlestick maker. People had a vegetable guy, a
fruit guy, a guy that sold spices.
One-stop shopping. What a wonderful, uniquely American concept. In the old days – and even today in Europe – shopping involves visiting different merchants for different commodities: the proverbial butcher, baker and candlestick maker. People had a vegetable guy, a fruit guy, a guy that sold spices.
Dad would send his kids to the corner saloon for a bucket of beer, and milk was delivered in the wee hours by a guy with a white, horse-drawn wagon.
Seems a bit more romantic than hopping into a 3.5-ton SUV for a four-block trip to Safeway where you’re bombarded by advertising messages and serenaded with one-hit wonders’ smooth-rock hits of the ’80s, doesn’t it?
These two disparate shopping experiences have one thing in common, though: in the old, specialty shops and in the huge grocery, they call you by name. The difference is, in the old days they usually pronounced it somewhat correctly.
Not many people in the United States outside of European ethnic communities cared much about wine in those days.
And in those circles – mostly Italian and French – much of the wine consumed was made in basements.
But there were entrepreneurs, like Emilio Guglielmo, who delivered wine to his customers, not unlike that milkman.
In fact, that practice was the mainstay of the Guglielmo business for many years, until wine attained a mass audience and it became more economical to bottle the product and sell it through modern distribution networks.
Shopping for wines that suit your palette can be a time-consuming process.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lot of fun to visit winery tasting rooms in search of the elusive perfect flavor profile, but according to the Wine Institute, the state of California alone was home to 1,294 commercial wineries in 2004.
The Institute didn’t say how many of those maintain tasting rooms, but I’d be willing to bet that roughly 60 percent do.
That’s 776 tasting rooms to visit. If you were to visit four each weekend, it would take you the better part of four years to visit them all, if you didn’t take any time off for other pursuits.
There are alternatives to all that traveling. Some wine shops, such as the Wine Club on Coleman Avenue in Santa Clara, offer a wide variety of wines to taste at any given time.
The store’s stock is extensive and deep, offering wines at decent prices from all over the world. And the folks there really know their stuff. Regularly, they have guest wineries come in and show off their wares, usually accompanied with some great food.
Another good option for tasting lots of wines is attending one of the great events that take place throughout the area.
One such is the Gavilan Kinship Center’s Wine and Food Tasting, a fundraising event that takes place on Sept. 10 this year at the Paicines Ranch south of Hollister. It’s a lot of fun, and gives attendees the chance to try the products of several different wineries, many of them from the surrounding area.
Soon, Gilroy will be the site of one of Sam Walton’s humungous Super Wal-Marts, the pinnacle of one-stop shopping.
I’m pretty sure that guy would have liked it if he could stock his stores so that customers would never have to go anywhere else for anything, ever. Maybe that’s why it was OK with Wal-Mart if people parked their RVs in the store’s parking lots overnight – sometimes for weeks and months. Why not? Where else are they going to shop?
Anyway, there is one of these gargantuan shrines to retail near my Dad’s house in Venice, Fla. and no visit to Pop and his consort Nancy is complete without a trip to Wal-Mart. Nancy’s nephew Robert is a driver for Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Ark., and there is nothing you can say that will persuade Nancy that Sam’s creations are probably the worst thing to happen to American business in the last two centuries, killing competition and dehumanizing employees.
Recently, there was news that Wal-Mart was partnering up with the E&J Gallo Company to produce mass-market, low-cost wine intended for sale in its stores.
And this announcement caused a great deal of stir among wags and joke writers, vying with each other to see who could come up with the best names for this wine.
Some of my favorites: Chateau du Traileur Parc, NASCARbernet, Chef Boyardeaux, Big Red Gulp, Chateau Des Moines and Nasti Spumante.
That’s probably a little snobbish, and Wine Chat is definitely not a snobby wine column, but you have to admit it’s also pretty funny. See you in the Wal-Mart wine aisle!
