Shopping at RWC? You Can Leave the Wine App in Your Pocket. (5 June 2018)

Shopping at RWC? You Can Leave the Wine App in Your Pocket.

June 5, 2018

We are often amused, sometimes a little bit sad, when we see customers using their wine apps to do research on bottles in our shop. Sometimes folks are checking to see if a particular wine on our shelves is something they've drunk before. This wine app feature is certainly useful, and arguably better than just taking a picture of a favorite label and having to scroll through hundreds of photos when you want to show us that wine you liked. More often, however, folks are just looking for some guidance beyond the shelf tags with my tasting notes on every wine in the store. Those hand written tasting notes should be a sign that this is not your usual wine shop. Many first-time visitors ask about those little tags, and are often surprised to find out they're the work of the dork standing in front of them. Not that I blame you for having a wine app on your smartphone. If more of my colleagues in the retail wine business were better wine merchants, and more restaurants had wine-knowledgeable servers, you wouldn't have had a need for a wine app in the first place. The fact is, many liquor stores and restaurants offer little or no help to their customers.

What makes RWC unique is that the folks who know stuff - who do the tasting and purchasing of everything - are the ones in the store serving you, every day. This is a concept so old it's brand new to most of our customers: a specialty shop staffed by people who know the inventory. What's more, they have historical knowledge of the business, which means that if we don't have the exact label you're looking for, it's likely we know the product anyway, and if we have something similar (or better) we can offer a comparable (or better) bottle. If not, we might be able to send you somewhere that has what you want. 

I'm sure I've lost some of you. If you're a certain age, chances are you remember that neighborhood hardware store (Hampden still has a great one, Falkenhan's) where you could not only find the exact tool and material to make a particular household repair, but a person who could tell you how to do it. Neighborhoods used to have their own bakeries, butcher shops, grocery stores, drugstores - each one of these places was owned by someone who knew their business intimately, and was on the floor, eager to serve - to sell of course, but also eager to build relationships in order to grow. If you have never had this sort of shopping experience, you don't know what you're missing, but I promise you, you're missing a lot.

One of our special skills is pairing wine and food. Many of our long time customers know all they have to do is tell us what they're having for dinner and we will find the perfect wine match. Algorithms are powerful tools, but I'd put our wine pairing ability up against any app. Of course, as the saying goes, the customer is always right. You can choose a wine app over an actual conversation, select your wine, and we'll be happy to take your money. It will still make us a little sad, because every experience like that makes us fear for a future when no one remembers what it was like to have a more intimate, enjoyable shopping experience.