It’s a question we’re often called upon to answer. It’s true enough that we sometimes move things around a bit to keep the Wine Corner looking fresh, a practice that can leave our clientèle scratching their heads when unable to quickly spot something they’re looking for. But this is a situation that’s quickly put right.
More often, your gone-away wine is either a matter of our deciding it’s time to part ways with an old friend, or that said old friend has decided to part ways with us.
The latter case is the easier to explain. Unlike beer or spirits or copier paper, the base material for winemaking is not in regular supply year ’round and so wine can’t be produced, at a single facility at least, in a continuous stream.
Wine is normally made from the fruit of a single vintage (the exceptions are few enough to gloss over at this point), and while there will always be some wine for us and you to buy, it is generally not the case that supply of any given wine is such that it will not be exhausted before the next vintage is ready to ship and distribute. Thus, breaks in continuity occur and with them comes the ongoing need to fill the holes they leave behind.
When the folks whose job it is to fill that shelf are, as we are, enthralled with small-production, sole proprietor or family-operated winemaking farms, and make it their business to winkle out labels you’re unlikely to see elsewhere, the problem of continuity is compounded. A thousand cases a year production of a certain cuvée from a guy making wine on a tiny holding on some sweet but steep Alpine slope (meet Sylvain Liotard) isn’t going very far when even a few obsesssives like ourselves are clamoring for a share.
Or, it may be that the new vintage of an old flame somehow doesn’t make the heart beat as fast as the previous one. Then, also, there are those days when we just decide that it’s past time you (and we) were seeing some fresh faces, falling hard for other wines from other places.
This may all seem a little bossy on our part, I know. But, after all, curation involves giving a nod here and a head shake there. Isn’t that what you pay us for?