They may not set retail prices, but you bet your ass they influence them.

Mike

Having worked briefly at a Distributor, I’m well aware of how jacked up the profit-game is, and I’m not at all a huge of of them. With that said, however, it’s not the distributors who set the retail price – that falls on the shoulders of the winery.

Those guys are next on my list!

I feel compelled to again respond. Again, I feel like you are ignoring several things that affect price. It seems that you lay the entire blame on the wineries who produce these wines and the consumer who drink them. I’ve already discussed the cost of production on the winery side and you’ve addressed the consumer side with comments on a market economy. What we are leaving out here are the costs of the antiquated three-tier system we have in place in the United States.

Specifically, the middle-men (i.e. distributors) have enormous influence and control over the wine market. They, not the wineries, make the largest profit on the wines they sell. And they want to keep it that way. The big distributors spend massive amounts of time and money producing propoganda on the evils of direct-to-consumer shipping and on lobbying state governments to maintain the status quo. Today, they are providing less customer service and are much more efficient at inventory management, yet their markup remains mostly constant. If you want to blame anyone for the “over-inflated” prices of Napa wines, I’d start with them.