Noble Rot Mayfair x TWS

Just read an email announcing the opening of the new Noble Rot Mayfair private dining room in the cellar. They have collaborated with TWS to offer a Wine Society Reserve which is described as follows:

To mark the opening of the new private dining room Noble Rot have teamed up with The Wine Society to present ‘The Wine Society Reserve’, a collection of rare, mature bottles from the depths of their cellars to be offered exclusively at Noble Rot Mayfair for a limited period.

As a Wine Soc member, I’m not sure how I feel about it. Does this benefit members?
 
Just read an email announcing the opening of the new Noble Rot Mayfair private dining room in the cellar. They have collaborated with TWS to offer a Wine Society Reserve which is described as follows:

To mark the opening of the new private dining room Noble Rot have teamed up with The Wine Society to present ‘The Wine Society Reserve’, a collection of rare, mature bottles from the depths of their cellars to be offered exclusively at Noble Rot Mayfair for a limited period.

As a Wine Soc member, I’m not sure how I feel about it. Does this benefit members?
Seems very sensible to me.
 
It does seem rather odd to me that a society which is non profit making and which only sells to its members is doing this.
Edited: the Rules of TWS now I have read them do indeed permit this, as Gareth and Paul correctly state below.

I’m against it but not because I’d pay the prices quoted above!
 
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It's clear that profit from old, valuable bottles can be used to subsidise prices of newer, cheaper wines and give other general benefits to all members such as enhanced service and delivery.

What I objected to in the past was

(a) a massive opening of finest Burgundies for "assessment" ... including one off things like Rousseau CSJ 1962 that should have be sold at auction or to a broker;
(b) auctioning off stock anonymously including 4 cases of Roumier Musigny 1983 (a good year chez Roumier!) at Christies, which went for low prices and weren't offered to clients (at least since the early 1990's): they should have at least raised a better price by declaring provenance if sold this way;
(c) advantageous EP offers sent to select members only rather than the usual, fairer, lottery methods (e.g., cut price EP Rousseau to a few who happen to be on a limited mailing list).

Maybe (c) still happens.

I'm not objecting to the current sale and am am happy that the declared provenance should merit better prices.

Otherwise what should the WS do now with older bottles?

(i) Sell them at a heavy discount to lucky clients (who will likely flip - or at least annoy other WP members by telling them about the Roumier Musigny 2010 they just bought for £500)?
(ii) List them at a moderate discount to Wine Searcher prices (say 10-25%) so that they don't sell? Who's rushing to buy Chave Cathelin 1995 at £6500 a bottle which is currently listed?
 
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I feel that when TWS now lists mature wines for so much more than their original release price, it entirely defeats the purpose of cellaring these wines for members’ eventual consumption in the first place. (TWS didn’t always increase the price of desirable wines they had cellared for members so aggressively.)

Also, members will often have missed out on allocations of wines offered en primeur only to see them now being sold on the TWS website some years later at multiples of their en primeur price. (I suppose TWS might have received more stock from the domaine in the interim at a higher price but it seems somewhat unlikely.) Why not sell more to members en primeur?

Other wines seem to have temporarily stopped being offered en primeur, e.g. Allemand 2018s, only to be sold on the website later on for what I assume is considerably more than they would have cost if offered en primeur.

Selling off the wines from the Society’s cellar at Noble Rot seems to follow the same trend!
 
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Interesting response on the TWS forum by Pierre Mansour saying this is part of a drive to attract younger Society membership. Currently, the average age of member is set to be 70 years old by 2030!

I’m not sure teaming up with Noble Rot will solve this. Probably more fundamental change to the selection of wines (and to the website) might be needed?
 
why don't they sell old wines to members as per the original object of buying them but the member has to post back the bottle as restaurants do for DRC allocations? At least then members would get to try them.

This only works in Germany with severe constraints imposed by the importer Kierdorf. Generally the wines are requested to be drunk young to stop stocks growing. In some cases, everything is required to be consumed before the next vintage is delivered! Also they generally don't sell to retail customers. Restaurants have some leeway, but I believe the flow of restaurant sales is meant to meet the flow of new allocations, with no appellation biases ... i.e., you can't hold all the RC back. When I went to Germany over this Summer for a friend's birthday, the wine bar had sold out of CC, Montrachet, and RC 2020 that my friend was hoping for, so we had to "make do" with RSV and LaT 2020.
 
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I agree entirely with Ben Hunting’s comments above and I’m appalled that TWS is not giving members the opportunity to acquire these wines, or hasn’t already done so. It might be permitted by the Society’s rules but, to me, it goes against its entire purpose and (supposed) ethos.

It does occur to me that the proprietors of Noble Rot might well be members of TWS. If so, they would have had the opportunity to buy the wines in the same way as other members if TWS had made a general offer of them; in that event they could have flipped them through the restaurant if they’d so wished.

The Society’s turnover is now so huge that the bit of revenue that will be generated by the sale to Noble Rot is insignificant and the general membership will see no real benefit from the exercise.
 
Not directly related, but fwiw, Noble Rot Mayfair has some interesting wines btg at not crazy mark-ups. Especially considering the location. Compare the online list with the online lists of Helene Darroze and Ducasse for instance.

A few weekends ago, wandering along Jermyn Street on a Saturday morning heading for the tube home, I bumped into an old friend of this forum who just happened to have flown in for a big wine event the following day. He asked if I had any lunch plans - I didn't - and after some discussion as to where we might go, I successfully called NR Mayfair asking for a table for an early lunch.

We had some very engaging Champagne (Prevost btg) to start and choose three small pours of very diverse whites with our starters. Looking at the list and the auspicious circumstance in which we found ourselves, my friend suggested that we might enjoy a bottle of mature Bordeaux. Looking at the list we selected Palmer 1989, priced below WS. We ordered it. The bottle looked fine, and our server went to open it, but then our server said the cork had come out without any resistance. Alas when we tried it it was totally oxidised.
So on to bottle two: again looked fine, cork came out correctly, but when poured ... corked! Rather than tempt fate with a third Palmer, we opted for a different play ... LMHB 1988. But it turned out that when the bottle was sought it was 1986 wrongly listed, which we didn't really want. My friend had also been keen to try L'Evangile 1985 as he had had an excellent bottle shared last year with NM. So third time lucky? Alas no. The wine was advanced, although some might have drunk it. We said we couldn't possibly send back a third bottle in a row, so we said we would pay for the bottle, but would buy a bottle of something else to drink. The server said immediately she would speak to her manager and came back saying that they couldn't possibly charge us for something we wouldn't drink. So when in a hole ... we opted for Plan B ... William Kelley's young Chambolle Foucheres 2019 (their last bottle, which had been btg the week before, at not much more than the retail price). We drank and finished this bottle with great pleasure, and we ordered some Port afterwards.
Anyway, I felt guilty. I'd never sent three bottles back. Excellent service ... in times when La Tour d'Argent now only opens bottles at buyer's risk.
 
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