Arggh! I find some wines for sale, at retail, in California, at prices awfully close to the WHOLESALE prices I can buy at, and, today, even below my wholesale purchase price, in one instance.
So I call my distributor, who listens patiently, then explains, for his thousandth time:
1. CA allows volume discount pricing to distributors, so the big ones can sell to their bigger retail customers at lower prices. This is how K&L, a giant online and brick-and-mortar retailer in the Bay Area, can offer such great prices (though, if you buy from them, you must pay shipping to get the wine up here, and by the time you do that, I can ALWAYS give you a better price). In Oregon, by state law every sale of a wine to a wholesaler (large or small) must be at the same price. So my distributors can't get discounted pricing even if they buy large volumes.
2. Most wine that gets to Oregon comes into the US in, or comes through, California. To get wine up to Oregon, shipping costs of approximately $2-3 per bottle must be paid. This increases Oregon's wine prices over California's big-city wine prices (the California boondocks face the same shipping price adder as Oregon does).
3. California, being a state with high income and property and sales taxes, has very low taxes on wine purchases. In contrast, Oregon, with its (pardon the editorial comment: stupido refusal to enact a sales tax and thereby raise some money from our tourists, who comprise Oregon's largest industry) has pretty high taxes on wine purchases.
Taken together, the Oregon consumer is disadvantaged compared to the California consumer. But, then again, how many of us would want to live in California, just to get cheaper wine? C'est la vie!
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