No Wine for the Holidays?There is chaos off the American West Coast.

When you go to shop this holiday season, some wines will be 50% more expensive and some just won’t be there at all.

If you were somehow inexplicably floating high above Los Angeles this week, looking down at the ocean, you would see an amazing sight —seventy-two giant container ships backed up from the Ports of Long Island and Los Angeles unable to land. Dock if you’re a sailor.

And, not just in L.A.

San Francisco, Oakland, and Seattle are backed up the same way. The ports on the West Coast have ground to a halt due to Covid and a shortage of workers among other things.

And you know what’s sitting out there the water for weeks waiting to get in?

Wine.

Lots and lots of wine.

Lots and lots of wine that’s not going to get to the shelf of your local store in time for the holiday season.

Supply Side

When I owned a wine and liquor store in Manhattan, New York we did 40% of our sales in 60 days—November 1st to December 31st. After Thanksgiving, we wouldn’t even take deliveries from suppliers because the store was packed with crazy people all wanting strangely shaped objects gift wrapped and delivered to addresses in New York City that didn’t always exist.

We stocked the shelves twice, sometimes three times a day for major items and bought unreasonable amounts of colorful gift wrap paper in giant rolls roughly the same size and weight as me that we stored in the basement cellar beneath the store.

In order for us to do this, the local distributors had to get our orders to us by November 1st, or better yet, mid-October. In order for the distributors to get the orders to us by November 1st the wineries or importers had to get the wines to the distributors by September 30.

Every order has to be checked in and verified case by case and sometimes bottle by bottle at every stage—winery to warehouse to truck to distributor to retailer (that would be us). Back then it was mostly done by hand on actual paper and using other quaint objects of minor historical interest—like pencils or retractable ball point pens.

Everything worked the same way if you were going from Europe to Los Angeles or San Francisco—only backwards. Boats sailed from Europe to warehouses on the American East Coast to truckers or different ships which went through the Panama Canal to importers to distributors in California who then reshipped to retailers— stores, restaurants, hotels, drug stores, gas stations, wine bars, etc.

Now I don’t need to tell you, dear reader, that it is well past September 30 at this very moment. It is in fact, just days from November.

So, all that wine that is floating off Los Angeles is not moving through ships and railcars and trucks to your local liquor store or favortie restaurant. It is floating off Los Angeles is what it is doing. It is already too late for most of it.

And, a whole bunch of money in circling the metaphorical toilet in multiple currencies and multiple countries around the world.

Prices

All of which brings to the price of the wines that are on the shelves this season.

One detail as a point of reference— a container that cost $2,500 to ship last year, now costs $25,000. And, here’s another—The United States is currently short 60,000 truck drivers, so when the ships finally go to unload, there is no one there to pick them up.

Which isn’t so bad since the trucks aren’t there either. The chassises end up in one place, the cabs in another and the containers in yet another. Getting trucks put together with attendant truck drivers at the point of unloading has become a nightmare of Ghost Buster-like biblical proportions.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost

For want of a shoe the horse was lost

For want of a horse the rider was lost

For want of a rider the battle was lost

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail

—Old Nursery Rhyme

The Devil is in the Details

I used to work for a wine importer in New York City. My most excellent job was to sit on a small hard chair, obviously stolen from some poor unsuspecting kindergarten kid, and work the teletype. People don’t know what a teletype is anymore, but it was kind of like a big magic typewriter than sent out messages over the telephone.

Just think Harry Potter, only real.

I coordinated wine containers coming in and going out, cleared the paperwork with customs in NYC, and generally made sure wine from all over the world got where it was supposed to go.

You don’t need teletypes today, but you still need to get the wine containers on and off the boat.

The rocking motion of the water oxidizes (ages) the wines so I had to make sure they were stored beneath the deck which reduced the swaying. Leaving a wine container on the deck of an ocean going freighter is not like leaving a container of garden tools on the deck.

The pitch and roll on the deck are doused in freezing ocean waves during storms and sometimes buried in snow. If it’s going through the Panama Canal from the East Coast to the West Coast, a deck container can reach over 115 degrees inside.

None of these conditions improve those delicate hints of rosewood and newly crushed shale you read so much about in the wine reviews.

Wine in Winter

If I succeeded in all that but didn’t get the wine off the boat or truck soon enough in the winter, then the containers got off the boat all right, but all the wine inside was frozen.

The wine would also freeze if one of the union dock hands forget to plug the heater in when it landed—so, occasionally, I had to ride the subway down to the docks, find somebody to bribe and make sure the heater got plugged in. Otherwise, you’ve got a container full of very expensive salad dressing.

Trucks arriving late in winter —after the warehouse closed—because of bad weather would sit overnight with the same results. Soggy cases collapsed onto each other as the sun came out and the day began to warm up.

Messy. Very messy. Bottles broke. Soaked cardboard gave way.

I suspect you now are beginning to see the problem with 72 ships stuck out in the ocean off Los Angeles.

There is a shortage of wine labels this season—from The Napa Register, October 11, 2021

And, by the way…

It’s not just wine sitting out there. It’s glass (bottles), it’s corks, and it’s paper too. And ink.

Paper may not seem like much but, no paper, no labels. No labels, no wine. It’s a federal law.

The price of wood pulp has risen from $700 to $1,200 per metric ton in the last year. The price of ink is up because additives, resins and such aren’t available.

And, that’s before we even talk about the glue. Glue holds those labels on the bottle and holds the boxes together that you ship them in.

Amazon sales have boomed during Covid—they can’t find enough boxes or truck drivers either one.

“The online retail business has boomed,” he explained. “So the paper that is manufactured safe for printing [labels] has been diverted towards corrugate for the boxes for Amazon and online retailers to ship their products.”

—Travis Pollard, vice president and general manager of ASL Print FX in Napa, as reported in the Napa Register, October 11, 2021

Massive container ship entering the Port of Long Beach, photo from Business Insider, Oct 23, 2021

Ryan Peterson, CEO of the freight logistics company, Flexport, noted that port operations in Long Beach were "at a standstill" on Friday. (Business Insider)

Through the Looking Glass

Look at anything closely enough and you’ll find you are looking at everything. It’s not logical, but it’s true.

It’s easy to look at all those breakdowns and see only what is being lost. And there’s a lot being lost to see.

But, it’s also possible to see these breakdowns and marvel at the way we have come to interact with each other today. The supply chain mess is a lightning strike in a moonless night that suddenly illuminates how deeply we are connected in everyday ways we never dreamed of, by showing what happens when those connections breakdown.

Every one of those breakdowns is a point that connects us. Or, did. Our connection just isn’t working at the moment.

You are personally connected to jungles in Thailand, forests in Portugal, and vineyards in Australia not to mention to semi trailers, truckers, dock workers and forklifts and importers in ports you can’t pronounce and you don’t even know exist.

Our global interconnections are working against us at the moment.

But, the same connection that is wrecking us now can work for us whenever and where ever we choose to notice it.

Be of good faith, ye lovers of wine.