When the seventeenth century French courtesan Ninon de L’Enclos declared, “Love never dies of starvation, but often of indigestion,” she had no idea that she was also explaining a major ingredient in the success of some wines today. Actually, it is the idea’s inverse that underpins the allure of certain wines: love can be created by starvation.
The aura of scarcity pervades so much of wine. Think of all the wines labeled “Reserve” whether they deserve it or not, and the prevalence of “prestige” and other words that create the impression of limited supply and heightened quality. They are like an airline’s “elite” status: if they have to call themselves that, they are probably anything but.
Then there is some wineries’ use of mailing lists, which is their equivalent of a club’s velvet rope. Tell people they can’t come in and they’ll break down your door to get inside. Some regions are indeed self-limited by geographical constraints. The entire length of Burgundy’s prime zone, for example, is only thirty miles long; its relative paucity of vineyard land is the driver in why wine from that region is so staggeringly expensive, regardless of whether a bottle of Burgundy is memorably luscious or essentially a bottle of flavored acid water.
Then there are wineries that carefully manage their scarcity, purposefully playing hard to get. Producers of Napa cult Cabernet, faced now with less demand than they enjoyed a generation ago, are allegedly storing excess bottles in warehouses. They do this while telling the world that their supplies are completely sold out. It is reminiscent of the diamond trade’s tendency to stockpile diamonds to maintain their high cost, while announcing to the marketplace that shortages are soon to come. As New York restaurateur Joe Bastianich wrote in his revealing book Restaurant Man, the golden rule in winemaking is that “you always want to make six bottles short of what your distributor asks you for.”
The most famous example of a wine company creating the impression of scarcity is Moët & Chandon’s Dom Pérignon. Dom Pérignon burnishes its rarefied reputation by sponsoring top art festivals, polo tournaments, and Formula One teams, as well as doing label collaborations with the world’s most expensive artists, such as Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol’s estate. At the same time, although the company guards its production figures, several media outlets have estimated that Moët actually produces millions of bottles of Dom Pérignon each vintage. If that amount seems far-fetched given Dom Pérignon’s heady reputation, consider that the largest retail purveyor of Dom Pérignon is a source far from manicured greens of polo fields: Costco Wholesale.