Customers often ask us how we choose the wines that Farr Vintners sells. To a certain extent the choice is simple as our number one goal is to offer great and famous wines to our customers at the best possible prices. Consequently, when a case of Petrus, Latour or Richebourg is offered to us it's not a question of "if" we want it but only a question of deciding on the price at which we think we can sell it, and then taking a small margin for Farr Vintners. As most of you know, we sell wines on a flat 10% commission for those not in a hurry for payment or buy outright at around a 20% margin if the vendor is looking for a cash sale. Most classic wines have a market price and we always try to find a good balance where both supplier and customer are happy with the deal.
However, there are often wines where the market is more vague and where our opinion on the quality in the bottle is more important. This is especially so for wines without reviews from the major critics. We don't need to taste Lafite 2000 every time we buy a case as the quality is well documented but with lesser wines we do taste most before we buy. In fact, the cheaper the wine, the more time and trouble we take to make sure that the quality is good enough for the price. There are virtually no wines out of the thousands that we list that at least one member of our team has not tasted.
The Usual Suspects face the camera
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I thought that it might be interesting for customers to have an insight into our selection process. Today we held one of our weekly blind tastings because a supplier had offered us two wines that we didn't know well and which have no tasting notes from the leading critics. These were the little known "Petit Figeac" - made by the producers of Chateau Figeac - and Chateau Pibran which is made by the team from Pichon Baron. As these were both 2005's, we assembled another 7 bottles of similarly priced wines and left them in the tasting room with Yvonne Dinan our Administration Manager. Yvonne is a bit of an expert in shuffling wines into random order and disguising them. She decants any bottles with distinguishing features (dark glass, different shapes, embossments, crests etc etc) into neutral bottles and then wraps each bottle in thick paper and gives it a number.
The 8 members of the Farr Vintners sales and purchasing team are then invited to blind taste and score the wines in our purpose-built tasting room. Before their identities are revealed, everyone has 2 positive votes for their favourite wines and one negative vote for their least favourite wine. Scores are then added up and the wines revealed. We then decide if we are going to buy the top scoring wine(s).
Shuffled and disguised, the wines are tasted by our team.
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In today's tasting the winner was our old friend and "benchmark" the wonderful 2005 Chateau Phelan Segur which has now won the last 3 blind tastings in which it has been served to me. It received my own top score yet again. However, very, very close behind was the slightly more approachable and softer 2005 Chateau Dauzac. This little known Margaux classed growth has been making very good wines in recent years and the 2005 must rank as the greatest Dauzac ever made. It has a lovely creamy texture with lots of ripe, soft fruit and some attractive vanilla spice and rounded tannins. This was a definite buy for us and at our selling price of £275 it's sensibly priced. 5 minutes after the tasting we were on the phone to Bordeaux and within half an hour the wine was for sale on our web site.
Just missing the cut by a whisker was the impressively built Pibran which had lots of chewy black fruit and some firm tannins. This is a wine that we might re-visit in the future. Poor old Petit Figeac was the Alan Davies of this particular show ending up with minus one point.
