Josh Wesson and Best Cellars
Retailer Highlights Wine Styles
By Mort Hochstein
Contributing Editor
If you build it, they will come. The idea worked for Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams and it appears to be working for Josh Wesson. “It” refers to Best Cellars, a wine retailing dream that Wesson has brought to life.
Best Cellars is unlike any wine store that ever existed on Main Street, in cyberspace or anywhere else. It stocks just 100 wines in a series of dramatically lit cubbyholes. The lighting does not harm the wine. There are no racks, no case displays, no Robert Parker or Wine Spectator ratings and no huge selling floors. There is no concern for origin or grape types, and salespeople know the wines. Best of all for many consumers, nothing costs more than ten dollars.
The Best Cellars concept was launched in 1996 with the opening of the first retail store. Focus at Best Cellars is on value, not the $10 price limit.
Best Cellars: will it become the Starbucks of wine? ©Best Cellars
Emphasizing Value and Enthusiasm
Wesson, 43, a primary partner in Best Cellars, which launched in 1996, says he has no trouble sourcing good wine in that price range. Many of his wines, all of which he personally tastes, are priced around $6.99 and up. As for the perennial merchant’s challenge of building a knowledgeable sales staff, Wesson says, “It’s not hard to learn about wines when you have to know just 100 labels and they’re already classified into styles.”
The stores are in sites hardly larger than a living room. They are designed for consumers who may not know wine and may be turned off by the multiplicity of choice and lack of proper guidance in many wine shops. Wines are displayed in eight categories: Fresh, Soft or Luscious for whites; Juicy, Smooth or Big for reds; Fizzy for sparkling, and Sweet for dessert wines. Wesson has been developing this concept for many years.
When wines are grouped by style, Wesson notes, lesser-known wines such as Chenin Blanc or Müller-Thurgau stand on their own as good white wines. The style system echoes a listing trend that is now becoming more popular on restaurant wine lists. It is a way, he adds, of taking advantage of consumer interest in pleasure and taste, rather than an intellectual approach about terroir, yield and viticultural practices.
Expanding the Stores
Best Cellars has three stores flourishing in New York, Boston and Seattle, with two additional sites opening in spring 2000 in Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Staff, including management, is young and well-educated, learning about wine on the job and enthusiastic about sharing that information.
Wesson and his long-time associate, Richard Marmet, have been on a hiring spree in recent months, adding 15 employees to support future expansion. There is an air of enthusiasm in the stores emanating from people eager to share their knowledge, even if they may have acquired it only twenty minutes ago.
The company recently moved to new headquarters, in lower Manhattan near the Holland tunnel. At this stage, the atmosphere in Best Cellars’ loft-like, open offices is reminiscent of a fledgling dot-com startup: a bit chaotic, but full of the explosive energy of young people honing a new, sure-fire concept. Wines submitted for sampling clutter the floor of a storage area and a conference room. The atmosphere is informal and rank does not matter. If there were employee parking available, which there is not, Wesson and Marmet would have no more priority than the newest staff member.
Give What People Want
In 1984, Wesson won a competition sponsored by Food & Wines From France to determine the best sommelier in the United States. One day after winning the title, he hired his former college roommate as a public relations man to help capitalize on his new-found fame.
For more than a decade, Wesson was nonstop at speaking engagements, professional training sessions and consultancies, as well as collaborating on a book about food and wine with TV personality David Rosengarten. As he traveled, he listened to what the public was telling him about the difficulties of buying wines and he began to fashion a retail concept to address those needs.
“I heard the same questions all the time,” Wesson observes, “and they all boiled down to ‘How can I make sense of the world of wine? How can I deal with all these choices when all I want is a wine for pizza, for my Moo Shu pork or as a gift to my girlfriend, without spending a lot of money?’”
“People need a sense of security,” Wesson says. “If they don’t like the wine they’d like to bring it back, the same way they might return an unsatisfactory food item in a restaurant. There are so many unnecessary factors that prevent people from becoming regular wine buyers.”
The problem was to level the playing field. “Americans are still way down on per-capita wine consumption,” he says. “Just about 10 percent of the people drink 90 percent of the wine in this country. You look at those figures and you can say either we’re screwed, or what an opportunity.”
He continues, explaining more of his company’s mission. “Let the other wine shops keep that 10 percent of the wine buying population. We’re not aiming for a share of that market. We are going for a bigger market, one that’s not important to other retailers: the person who only comes into a store once or twice a year. Our goal is to get that 90 percent to come to our stores and buy wine the same way they buy bread—fresh and new, on the way home from work a couple of times a week or more.”
Changing the Rules
Leveling the playing field called for creating a new shopping experience, according to Wesson. How, he asks, do you do this with a product normally associated with more affluent buyers and normally selling at a price point out-of-reach to most consumers. “In most wine stores,” he observes, “you go in and you either have to know what you want or find a good salesperson. If you can’t do either, then you’re wandering in the desert.”
“Once you selectively remove the obstacles of wine buying—too many choices, no guarantee of excellence, no opportunity to return wines—the things that drive new wine consumers nuts, you are left with Best Cellars. We stress that quality is a given and if it’s in the store, it’s a quality wine, whatever the price.”
In choosing his under-$10 price point, Wesson explains, “The figure of $10 just happens to be the price level consumers told us was their threshold: above that point it’s for a special event and below it’s an impulse buy. Below $10, wine isn’t competing with other wines, but with beer, upscale sodas, or even designer waters. A bottle of Evian costs $3 or more. Our competitors are water, beer, ginseng tea and other alternative beverages. So the simplified list of wines we carry are a major factor in our retail strategy.”
“Lots of stores carry more than 1,000 wines,” Wesson says. “Salespeople can’t taste the expensive ones and they can’t keep up with all the others. When you have only 100 wines to figure out, a salesperson or a customer finds it is a lot easier than 200 or more.”
Taste To Sell
Best Cellars conducts nightly tastings, each built around a theme such as Chinese New Year or Postcard from the South of France, and supplemented by food demonstrations on Saturdays. Wine and spirits shops in New York cannot sell food, but they can give it away so Best Cellars may pair wines with hot dogs on the Fourth of July, followed the next week by more upscale delicacies created by the three-star Jo-Jo’s restaurant. “Giving bite-size samples with wine helps people appreciate it,” Marmet observed recently.
Tastings apply to employees as well. “We are probably the only wine shop in the country where every single employee has tasted every wine,” says Wesson. “They taste every night and they can’t do that in a large store. Even an owner in a large store doesn’t taste them all. Theoretically,” Wesson notes, “if someone came to one of our stores every night, that person could taste every wine in the store in three months.”
Supplier As Partner
Wesson says that at first suppliers did not understand the Best Cellars concept because they had never seen anything like it. “Now,” he says, “they look at us as partners and that idea has trickled down to producers as well. There are enormous numbers of wines available to us, particularly since we are not locked into region of origin and we buy on a value basis,” he says.
Wesson says he has seen a downward trend on mid-priced California wines in the past few years. “We were recently offered a Sonoma Valley Russian River Pinot Noir that I couldn’t even have thought of buying three years ago because it carried a higher price tag. There’s always some market opportunity and because we are not confined to place of origin—we don’t have to have seven Burgundies or six Bordeaux—we could have three one year or eight at another time. There’s so much good wine out there that sourcing is probably the easiest part of our job.”
But, he adds, suppliers have to know our growth curve and know our needs, stressing that, “we don’t want problems with wines becoming successful and then we cannot get them.”
Wesson says he is not concerned with competition from e-commerce retailers such as Wine.com and WineShopper.com. “In the realm of virtual retailing,” he opines, “operators must spend a heroic amount of money for advertising to build a brand. It is their biggest line item. We have a store and 100,000 people walk by it every week. It’s our own billboard and people can walk in and see what we have to offer.”
Wesson travels frequently, seeking out sites for new stores. He says he looks for high profile, small places and has never had a problem unearthing A-plus locations. “Realtors,” he says, “want us and see us almost as a community service, the way they did Starbucks and coffee bars before there was one on every corner. The goal is to grow the market because there is so much potential out there.”
Mr. Wesson is the featured speaker at the California Association of Winegrape Growers Annual Meeting on January 25, 2000 at the Sacramento Convention Center.
Mort Hochstein has written for leading wine journals and trade publications including Nation’s Restaurant News. His last article for Wine Business Monthly covered South American wine producers.
