I know that LB has a reputation for stretching the truth on their comp pricing but this is one too far. Costco selling for even lower than LB and way below the “best price”. I understand LB can’t check every possible retailer but this is just a fair warning that their pricing strategy can manipulate you into thinking you’re getting a crazy deal.
by FatherEsmoquin
21 Comments
Fair–you always need to cross-check with them–but that doesn’t meant that you still don’t sometimes find amazing deals on LB.
I mean, anyone who buys it without checking wine-searcher is just asking for it, after all. And Costco can get insane deals on their wine purchases, they’re one of the biggest buyers in the country. Besides – they say “best web” – which is correct based on wine searcher. Costco does not list this on the web.
This is a tough one. Costco famously has razor thin margins and suppliers practically lose money selling through them. With that in mind, I can see how this price is so good there. Perhaps there should be a Last Bottle caveat for best price*
*outside of club stores
Who is blindly trusting Last Bottle with retail pricing? The internet is your friend when it comes to price comparison, so do some research and then decide if the price Last Bottle lists is worth it to you.
I always cross reference before I buy a seemingly amazing deal from LB. There are some great deals to be had! This one I passed on 🤷♂️
How is that wine? Has anyone opened it?
Not every Last Bottle deal is actually a deal. Always double check.
Beau Vinge has some great value wines. When I saw this at Costco I sent them a message and they said what they sell at Costco is different than their Cult from the winery.
This bottle looks identical, but they are advertising the bottle they sell direct at their winery.
As someone who worked on the distribution side before going back to the auction arena, companies like this one, WineSpies, etc take excess unsold at a large discount and then pretend it’s a deal. Bigger distributors have so much more excess stock right now that they will fill any available channel for cash flow.
I don’t buy California Cab lately. First of all because my cellar is chokeful of them and Bordeaux I really need to open because some of them are a couple of decades old now and might be over the hill.
But mostly because the prices are crashing and will crash even more. I can’t count the number of growers in the North Coast telling me they couldn’t find buyers two or three years in a row, or who got their contract downright canceled.
I’ve purchased some Beau Vigne from Total Wine and honestly, pretty average.
I have a couple bottles of the signature 1 romeo 1 juliet in the cellar and not sure I’ll open any
time soon. $190 locked up that I wish I spent on something else. Maybe they will evolve into something wonderful. For now, it seems like money not well spent.
I’ve had more enjoyment from a $30 bottle of Turley Juvenile, Ridge Three Rivers, $35 Seven Rings Oak Knoll, $50 Taub Heritance, $130 Keenan Reserve Cab Spring Mtn District (review coming 🙂) than any of the 6 different Beau Vigne wines I have purchased and drank. There is better value elsewhere for sure.
First time you noticed this? They basically sell wines at standard retail, but you just don’t understand sales or marketing psychology.
i wouldn’t pay $24-29 for this wine anyway
I’ve been getting downvoted, such is life. Here is the email that they sent me back in 2023 when I saw this wine at Costco for the first time.
Thanks so much for your inquiry. We realize this is a bit confusing to our customers, hopefully, I can explain it a bit better for you.
The Cult that you see at Costco is actually a slightly different product that we sell on our website. We have an exclusive contract with Costco to sell this wine and because they purchase so much their pricing is fantastic. Isn’t that the beauty of Costco and why we are members?!
So how are they different from each other? Up until barrel aging, the wine is the exact same product. Once the wine is placed into the barrel it has an opportunity to be enhanced by the barrel itself and each barrel enhances the wine differently. The reasons for this are many, but examples could be the barrel itself or the location of the barrel in the winery. The winemaker selects a handful of barrels that are showing the wine particularly well and keeps those aside for personal handling. This is what the industry calls “barrel select.” At Beau Vigne, we keep this wine for ourselves to sell on the website.
The rest of the barrels get blended together at bottling so there is consistency in the larger lot. Those bottles are sold to Costco.
So while the product at Costco is fabulous – the product on our website is just a teeny bit better with this special handling by the winemaker. I encourage you to do a side-by-side tasting for yourself and see if you can taste the nuances!
This is 100% user error.
I’ve sworn off Last Bottle/Last Bubbles, and I’ve been buying less generally from online retailers (WTSO, etc). I’m finding less and less deals these days, and with LB in particular, I’m not very happy with their customer service. One of the bottles of champers I bought during a recent fizz fest ended up not being the bottle advertised (they said it was a BdB, but what I got was the producer’s base cuvee). I reached out and they were basically like “…okay, what do you want to do? return the bottle?”. There was palpable annoyance, which is ridiculous because the base cuvee from this producer is $15-20 less expensive than the BsB (the price I paid for the base cuvee was actually more than my local shop sells it for).
Local wine shops > everything else these days.
Costco sells at dang near cost. If they have something it’s going to undercut the market 99% of the time.
Unless the winery has its own estate and owns the vineyard I’m hard pressed to bother with prices above $60. Even with Napa wines. The market has shrank and there’s a lot of options in the $30 range from similar winemakers that just buy grapes or juice.
Beau Vigne at this point is merely a brand. At one point it had a vineyard but after multiple acquisitions that isn’t the case anymore. The wine is probably fine but don’t be fooled by the marketing/website.
Last Bottle, and similar companies, do what they can to make 5%-10% while attempting to make you feel good about the purchase. I’d say the key to judgment is the end price and $30 seems fair, especially since it’s getting shipped to you for free(order minimum of 4 bottles).
Nobody is buying from their wholesaler to sell at a loss. If a price is reduced on the shelf, it’s because it was reduced by the wholesaler as well.
Always Vivino before buying. Yes, “Vivino” is a verb now. Cheers, mates.
next up – declassified margaux is not actually as good as chateau margaux
Last bottle gets almost all their wine selections on closeout from wineries or distributors. Basically the last call on a product before it’s destroyed or sold for ethanol.
Costco, doesn’t generally buy on closeout, but sometimes they do for something of relative quality like a Napa AVA Cabernet.