Noble Rot Mayfair x TWS

I haven‘t got a problem with this. Given they find themselves with presumably relatively small numbers of bottles of relatively old and valuable wines, the society will be damned whatever they do…
- sell to members at market price = “what’s the point of a mutual if no advantage for members”
- sell to members below market price = “the society is benefitting cash-rich members who can instantly flip these for big profits”
- send them to auction = “they didn’t make enough money, doing members out of profit in the coffers”
- Noble Rot = this thread
- etc etc.
 
Andy Leslie said:
I haven‘t got a problem with this. Given they find themselves with presumably relatively small numbers of bottles of relatively old and valuable wines, the society will be damned whatever they do…
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My wife suggested that the best solution would have been to auction the wines with the proceeds going to charity.

On the TWS forum a society committee member has posted that there are 180,000 active members, which seems like an extraordinary number to me. I wonder if they really need to retain such a large membership.
 
Thom Blach said:
It seems to me that selling the wines in a restaurant so that they are consumed on the premises as per their original purpose is a pretty good solution all round, particularly if prices are fair.
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That's not unreasonable.

I'd like to know when a similar event will take place here, in Bumpkinland. Or other far reaches of the UK.
NB. I don't really care what the do, as long as TWS spare me their sanctimonious cant.
 
Don’t worry Tom - I don’t in the slightest bit worry about it ! I just think there is a better way…that would open up these prized bottles to more of the membership than offering them through a restaurant in Mayfair.

I would be amazed if an open auction concluded with a price that left anything/much on the table for flippers. And if they go for more than they’re being offered for at Noble Rot then great.
 
These most sought after burgundies are generally quite easily available if one wishes to pay the price, much more so than more modest wines. If only paying that price were alone enough to guarantee a thrilling experience!
 
It almost feels like the main issue here is transparency. I suspect if a commercial explanation was provided, membership would be far more accepting.

At the end of the day, TWS have reiterated over and over how they’ve resisted inflation and duty increases - that has to come from somewhere and it’s probably from initiatives like this.

I sit in the camp like many other members of this forum that hopes to have a TWS membership that allows me access to what I would loosely describe as “fine wine” through their buying power, and that’s pretty much the only value TWS has to me. The reality is TWS service a huge market of fairly good quality but quite budget friendly wine that has exceptionally tight margins - stuff I don’t drink a lot but many others do. There is a strategic imperative here of satisfying the majority of membership.
 
Nick Donnan said:
They can't win. Whatever they do a portion of members will moan. My gripe is the amount of management time that must be spent trying to work out how to appease the hugely vocal but tiny minority of members who are interested.
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I'd hope they would entirely ignore them. After all any member can make a proposal at the AGM or even call an emergency meeting if they think something is going really wrong. Overall they do a very good job and I don't think anyone can much complain.
 
I agree about TWS doing a very good job overall, Gareth. If anything, I might complain about members complaining about missing out on wines! In response, TWS, who seem attentive to such complaints, doesn’t then know how best to offer out rare and low stock wines without causing disquiet among some of the membership, as others have noted in relation to the Noble Rot scheme. I would prefer to at least have the chance to buy rarer wines at a good price from TWS even if I’m actually more likely to miss out.
 
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I think it feels off because if ‘benefiting the members’ just equates to maximising profits (eg by selling stock through other channels) then why not just make widgets. And indeed just become an ordinary limited company with shareholders.

But that said if it’s allowed under the rules of membership that’s that really. As members we’ve agreed it can happen. As Gareth says raise it at the AGM. The management can’t be criticised for doing something which is permitted under the rules.
 
Nick Amis said:
If what they say is true, these wines were previously offered and had mouldered unsold. It's not clear that anyone who's moaning about this initiative would actually buy these wines from TWS at the prices they've been listed at.
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I’m one of the whingers and I certainly wouldn’t buy at those prices. To use a Yorkshire expression, I couldn’t thoil it, i.e. I could afford it but I couldn’t justify it.

For me, the question is whether an organisation like TWS should be offering such wines to its members at prices that are so massively above the price at which TWS will have acquired them. As ever, of course, the problem is the inflated current market prices and the propensity of greedy buggers to flip them. Surely a way could be found of enabling “ordinary” members to experience these wines. For example, one of the best wine experiences I have had was a vertical of Ch Palmer - including the 1961 - held by TWS at a sit-down dinner in Harrogate, where the Society took over the restaurant for the event. For a modest charge, a significant number of members drank wines to which they might otherwise never have had access. I would far rather that members of the Society could drink these wines rather than customers of a commercial restaurant.

TWS bangs on incessantly (in a way that it used not to do) about being a not-for-profit members’ organisation but it seems that it doesn’t always “walk the walk”.

What is the point of TWS having precious allocations of Rousseau Chambertin if the members aren’t going to be able to enjoy them. There must be large numbers of passionate but relatively impecunious wine-lovers who are members, and who would give their eye-teeth to experience such a wine. Doesn’t the Society exist to enable that to happen (without the loss of teeth)?
 
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Colin Bradley said:
For me, the question is whether an organisation like TWS should be offering such wines to its members at prices that are so massively above the price at which TWS will have acquired them. As ever, of course, the problem is the inflated current market prices and the propensity of greedy buggers to flip them. Surely a way could be found of enabling “ordinary” members to experience these wines.
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If TWS strictly limited the number of bottles of such wines that could be purchased per member while still selling the wines at a price closer to what they cost to acquire, that would surely stop flipping being particularly lucrative? And I expect that for every flipped bottle there would be many happy members who actually bought and drunk their bottles!
 
The best way to do it might be more lotteries - either to buy the wines (the problem would then be the possibility of flipping them) or to be offered tickets to dinners where these treasures are opened. There are a number of ways to do these things.

I think the most important thing that's been said is that they are damned whatever they do. I do feel for them sometimes.

PS: I've just logged in to WS to see I have a bottle of Barolo Monvigliero 2018 I must have won in the burlottery. Drink or keep?! And a load of Burgundy. I really must get wine buying under control
 
I rather suspect Pierre Mansour et al are not going to read the WP forum so it is probably their community forum which would be a good place to make any points if we really want TWS to take note. Colin's point about using their stocks of icons and unicorns purchased EP or from precious allocations to add a dimention to events is something I have appreciated. Pre-pandemic dinners and tastings that spring to mind are the stunning Zind Humbrecht and Guigal dinners in Farringdon, a marvellous Pichon Lalande tasting in London with held back bottles poured and aavailable to purchase afterwards at sensible prices. Am sure some flipped but mine have been squirrelled and treasured.

My vinous journey was very much enhanced by TWS - I am pleased that in no small measure the WP forum seems to fulfil that with WIMPS and (hopefully to be resumed) Northern offlines meaning I am tasting wines I have never considered or that were not on my radar when accessible. If nothing else, this thread has been a pleasant reminder of the continuing journey.
 
Colin Bradley said:
I’m one of the whingers and I certainly wouldn’t buy at those prices. To use a Yorkshire expression, I couldn’t thoil it, i.e. I could afford it but I couldn’t justify it.

For me, the question is whether an organisation like TWS should be offering such wines to its members at prices that are so massively above the price at which TWS will have acquired them. As ever, of course, the problem is the inflated current market prices and the propensity of greedy buggers to flip them. Surely a way could be found of enabling “ordinary” members to experience these wines. For example, one of the best wine experiences I have had was a vertical of Ch Palmer - including the 1961 - held by TWS at a sit-down dinner in Harrogate, where the Society took over the restaurant for the event. For a modest charge, a significant number of members drank wines to which they might otherwise never have had access. I would far rather that members of the Society could drink these wines rather than customers of a commercial restaurant.

TWS bangs on incessantly (in a way that it used not to do) about being a not-for-profit members’ organisation but it seems that it doesn’t always “walk the walk”.

What is the point of TWS having precious allocations of Rousseau Chambertin if the members aren’t going to be able to enjoy them. There must be large numbers of passionate but relatively impecunious wine-lovers who are members, and who would give their eye-teeth to experience such a wine. Doesn’t the Society exist to enable that to happen (without the loss of teeth)?
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I think this is a lovely idea, and I've also been really happy to enjoy some surprisingly cheap fine wine from TWS, but I think they've now decided they need to take a more commercial approach with the posh stuff to help them hold prices for the cheaper wines. The average TWS sale price per bottle is below £10 iirc...
 
I can’t help but wonder whether TWS’s adopting such a course of action (the deal with Noble Rot) might erode some of the goodwill the Society enjoys with vaunted producers. There will have been a time when the likes of Rousseau and Allemand needed TWS, and some of these producers might like the idea of their products going to a wine-lovers’ co-operative, but they don’t need TWS now and if TWS is going to flog off the wines the producers might think that they may as well sell the lot to commercial merchants. It does seem that many Burgundy producers like to sell to their private client list or to restaurants, so that people who will appreciate them can enjoy them, and they might put TWS in the same category - provided that it doesn’t then act like a conventional merchant.
 
Nick Amis said:
I think this is a lovely idea, and I've also been really happy to enjoy some surprisingly cheap fine wine from TWS, but I think they've now decided they need to take a more commercial approach with the posh stuff to help them hold prices for the cheaper wines. The average TWS sale price per bottle is below £10 iirc...
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I think the problem with this, Nick, is that in relation to TWS’s current turnover the revenue generated by selling off the unicorn wines will be so small as not to contribute significantly to the price-lowering endeavour.
 
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