A “shelf talker” is a slip of paper or a card with a few words that describe the wine sitting on the shelf or in the box that retailers hope will entice people to buy it.
One such shelf talker long ago said that a particular wine had received a gold medal in a major wine competition. A friend who was the man who ran that competition knew that this was a falsehood.
A prior vintage of that wine had received a gold medal, but that was four years earlier! This particular wine had not yet been made.
My friend contacted the winery. A winery spokesperson pleaded innocent, saying that the shelf talker was put up by the retail shop. “We had nothing to do with it,” she said.
False reviews abound. And it is not in anyone’s best interest, except consumers’, to check on their validity. Which isn’t easily done.
The above episode occurred 30 years ago, but the tale is still valid. Not all shelf talkers have false information, of course, but the temptation to fib is obvious. And it appears that some shelf talker claims include “alternative facts.” Most wineries tell the truth on these miniature signs, but not always.
That leads to similar situations. Years ago, when I was a restaurant reviewer, I rated a cafe as excellent. Years after the review ran in the newspaper, I dined there again. The place had gone downhill horribly.
Yet the newspaper’s website still had my original review that praised the place. There was a date on the review, but it was in such small type that I doubted that most readers would notice.
Reviews that are “stale” are a problem for the wine industry. As a perishable product, wine declines over time. And what might have been a valid review two years ago may be far from the truth today.
This is particularly true when it comes to young white wines. Today, the release of 2023 whites is occurring. If a wine review for a prior vintage appears on a 2023 bottle, there’s a reasonable chance it is not very precise.
But as I previously stated, it’s really difficult to determine when the shelf talker or review was created and whether the words really apply to the vintage now being sold.
There is another topic slightly related to this that may appear in stores that are offering some red wines that are strange.
Smoke from Northern California wildfires affected many red wine grapes in 2020. Now appearing on some store shelves are some red wines that are advertised on their labels as having been aged in bourbon or whiskey barrels.
I purchased one of these wines and tried it. It was particularly awful. The aroma was that of an ashtray—precisely the description that some people (myself included) have used to describe the aroma of wines that were ruined by smoke taint in 2020.
I suspect that some wine companies, rather than discard their horrid smoke-tainted red wines from 2020, decided to age them in whiskey barrels and then market them that way. To me, the smell is ghastly.
When I buy a red wine, I prefer that it smells and tastes like red wine, not an ashtray. Unless you like this character, I would ignore all wines aged in whiskey barrels.
