Buying Wine at Costco

Costco is the largest seller of expensive wines in the United States. Costco is also cheaper entertainment than the movies and you meet more interesting people there. You can buy wine and watch your neighbors do exotic things with electric heaters at the same time.

To me, Costco is the largest purchase order I’m likely to get in my life and the place that gets me fired if I don’t get one. That warps my view of the place.

People ask me all the time what I look for when I’m in a wine store or a restaurant. I tell them a purchase order. This tends to confuse them because when I think of a wine store or a restaurant, I think of myself as selling wine not buying wine. But, I know what they are asking.

They are trying to make sense of that solid wall of wine bottles that for most people is an impenetrable slab of glass and paper made up of part social status and part obscure European swear words.

I know what I look for, but to test myself I’m off to the Costco in Novato, California with the idea of seeing the world’s largest seller of expensive wines through a normal person’s eyes, normal being used here in the broadest sense of that word. It is Costco after all.

The first thing you notice about Costco is that the parking lot is the size of Kansas. It’s Destruction Derby. The ballet of brightly colored, recently dented cars alone is worth the trip for entertainment purposes.

If you have the time, it's worth waiting for the feral grocery carts which burst out of the bushes without warning. Very amusing.

Since grocery carts are a social species they travel in packs, sometimes 30 or more at a time lined up together like a bright silver out-of-control cobra.

If you wait for it, you will see one or two inexplicably suddenly turn and attack random SUVs, sometimes rolling across entire parking rows before crashing into brand new metal doors with a sound which really can’t be replicated anywhere else.

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if people came from all over the world just to listen to silver carts crash into shiny new Honda CR-Vs at the most unlikely of moments.

Assuming your papers are in order, you will be allowed across the heavily guarded Costco border into the American dream—consumer goods stacked to the ceiling, all conveniently available for immediate purchase at a major discount.

The thing is, you can’t casually drop by Costco. It’s more like a life commitment. You don’t go to Costco to buy wine. You go there to buy 10 cases of shrink-wrapped berry drinks.

I myself am here to seek out cheese and maybe a slab of previously frozen salmon parts. Wine is what you buy when you’re waiting for your two gallon drum of green beans to be brought out from the back.

The wine section is dwarfed by the Bermuda shorts section. Assorted samples of unrelated ethnic delicacies drive the crowd into a frenzy, and fill the unrelated ethnic food delicacies section’s aisles.

The wine section on the other hand is like a church. A lot of people walk by but hardly anyone goes in.

Since I am trying to see the wine shelves the way a normal person would, I am forced to consider the most powerful question in wine and spirits marketing—how do I get people to care as much about wine as they care about coleslaw?

You see, most people feel about the wine section the way I feel about the cosmetics section at Macy’s. It is a mass of indecipherable distinctions and code phrases marked with labels that sound like a quantum physics lecture.

And, to tell you the truth, I can’t tell the difference in cosmetics anyway, although I do notice there are a lot of interesting colors involved. Also, very intent looking women who I assume are chemistry graduates from Harvard.

The difference seems to be that with wine, I’m not just looking at the colors or the labels. Like everybody else in the wine business, I carry a library of smells and tastes in my head from way too many years of tasting and drinking and passing judgment.

A tape in my mind starts running when a phrase like “fermented near the bottle” or “our family came to Hayward, California in 1628 and has been growing grapes no one can pronounce since my great grandfather kicked the bucket in aught 6” show up on the label.

It’s not a visual or audio tape though, instead, it’s smells and tastes. There are only four or five tastes, depending on whether you subscribe to the Japanese theory of gustatory sensory awareness (five) or the European (four) so the taste tape is a very fast tape, more like a blip.

“I have lived temperately....I double the doctor's recommendation of a glass and a half of wine each day and even treble it with a friend.”~ Thomas Jefferson

I’m not convinced umami (the fifth taste) even exists in Western food, or that if it does that we could recognize it, but if you are looking to be a wine expert it’s useful to throw into a conversation.

Nod slowly while tasting and say, “Just a touch of umami to accentuate the harder tannins, I’d warrant.” Then, wait to see if anybody challenges you. They won’t. Most people won’t have a clue what you’re talking about. It’s also impossible to prove, so you’re good.

And you can always say, “Well, of course it takes a seasoned palate to detect.” As long as they are not a Japanese chef you’re fine.

There are over a trillion smells which the human body is able to detect which is way more than the 5 tastes we can detect but way less than a dog can smell. Mostly, it’s smells that are running on that tape in my mind. Somewhat less than a trillion though I’d say.

Normal people have a life and don’t have much of a library about wines although some of them have a book or two. And, they may very well have a huge library about something else—legal cases, winning jockeys, esoteric financial instruments, art, music, etc.

In any case, half of the labels remain a mystery to me too—just like the cosmetics counters in Macy’s.

The only difference is that I know Pauillac is not a bar in New Jersey and I can discourse with unfettered fervor on the merits of cabernet franc grape versus carignon in region three valley-floor wines. Mostly, that’s useless but it keeps us wine types amused and provides a way for us to feel superior to each other.

I look for geography (appellations, countries, mountains) and grapes I recognize (I’m useless if it’s Malgousia or Katsifali for instance), and when I can, I look for winemakers.

Also years, although these days you mostly just don’t want it to be more than two years old because 80% of wine bought in American is consumed within two weeks of purchase and vintage is not important.

It’s not important because you don’t have a choice. There’s only one and what you see is what you get. It’s true that certain years make better wines than they do in other years, but unless you’re buying wines for investment or to lay down in your cellar for 10 years, most of the wines you have available to you in a store are within two or three years of each other.

It’s a little bit of a generalization, but usually any wine under $25 won’t show a difference you can notice unless you are able to taste it next to other vintages of the same wine at the same time (a vertical tasting).

Variations in handling, storage, shipping and such override most vintage variations that you find in stores.

"It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife."
- Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
Sebastian Barnack, in Time Must Have a Stop, ch 12 (1944)
Assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne.

If you are lucky enough to be able to afford $100 per bottle wines then that’s also different, but that’s not the usual case. And, with those kinds of wines, what lawyers and oenophiles ie, your basic wine experts, call provenance becomes very important.

Provenance is where did this stuff come from and how did it get here? And, now that you mention it, how long has it been sitting behind the tire section next to the heater? What are those little bubbles doing in my Charmes Chambertin? And why for God’s sake, are you hanging wine from the ceiling when that’s the hottest place in the building? That kind of thing.

I am just a little more likely to recognize something in the wine section than most because I spend all day thinking about wine instead of aluminum.

"Wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile." - Homer, The Odyssey (9th c. B.C.)

While I’m standing here contemplating the ultimate meaning of zinfandel a woman in the section next to me is contemplating a lawn mower and the meaning of grass cutting appliances.

That’s the beauty of Costco. It keeps you from getting too wound up about being a world famous wine expert.

This lady has a library in her head too, of all the memories and information she has about lawns and how to cut them—a library I don’t have. Maybe, she has a bigger library about lawns than I have about wine. You never know. I would never know anyway, because I don’t know squat about lawns or how to cut them either one.

In the wine section I am an expert. Fifteen feet away nobody cares. I think all wine critics should be required to go to Costco once a year whether they need to or not and sell lawn mowers. Maybe, it would give them a little perspective.

I pick up a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc made by a woman I know. It gets lost in the cheese and the fish and 50 lb bag of paper towels already in the basket. I consider a box of green beans and decide to leave it for another day. On the way out I slow down by the hot dogs and diet fruit punch but thinking better of it, I keep moving.

Despite my best efforts at self inquiry I have not figured out how to make people care more about wine than coleslaw. Although, I will say, it’s a lot of coleslaw.

Still, having filled myself with such Costco wisdom as may be, I move to the door where I am strip searched as usual. I wave a receipt I picked up off the floor at them and they seem happy.

Now, I’m off to Safeway.