But maybe it was designed for the overwhelmed consumer who is content to browse for something with a clever or colorful label. Who would find the RAM system helpful? Not someone who knows what she wants. There are lots of Ports here in the Puget Sound area, but none of them are the source of Port wine.
There was a section for Local Wines, but looking there we stumbled upon the Port. In computer talk that means Random Access Memory and the wines seemed pretty random to me - no United Nations, not much canned veg. Apart from a big bunch of Cabernet Sauvignon in one spot, the general organizing principle seemed to be RAM. We were looking for Chilean wines, not an unreasonable thing to search for, and we never found them if they were there. I wonder if this the result of marketing research or just an accident? You can imagine my surprise, then, when Sue and I recently visited a new store, part of a national supermarket chain that takes wine seriously, where all our experience navigating the wine wall was rendered useless. Of course this doesn’t matter much if all you want to do in find the 1.5 liter bottle of Barefoot Moscato you buy every week. You can waste a lot of time and effort tracking down your Pinot choice.
#Retail store wine maps napa plus
If you want to browse Pinot Noir wines, for example, you need to visit a number of different locations (Pinot Noir, for domestic wines, plus France, and New Zealand and maybe also Chile, Australia, and others if the store’s selection is strong). Here’s one problem with the standard system. It was originally designed to slow down users in order to prevent them jamming the mechanism. The QWERTY layout is familiar, but inefficient. This is the hybrid system I know best, but I don’t think it works very well. But does the general outline sound familiar? There are lots of variations on this canned veg – United Nations system, so your favorite store is probably a bit different. You will also find smaller wine displays here and there in the store - near the cheese, meat, fish, and deli counters, for example.
Alternative packaging rates its own section with box wine and now also canned wines holding forth. Sparkling wines from wherever are all collected together in one place, something that is often true of Rosé wines, too. There is often a sort of Siberia over in the corner for “other” wines, sweet, fortified, alcohol-free, kosher, organic, and so on. I have seen the entire southern hemisphere reduced to a couple of shelves. Sometimes groups of countries get lumped together (Spain + Portugal, Chile + Argentina). Imports are mapped like the United Nations. I used to think that I knew the wine wall map and I wrote about it in my 2011 book Wine Wars. The domestic wines are often arranged like the canned veg aisle - all the Zinfandel here, all the Pinot Noir there. So much choice! Consumers need all the help they can get to navigate this crowded retail archipelago.
You will find 1000-2000 in many stores today and the big box alcohol superstores like Total Wine and BevMo have about 5000 wine choices at any given time. The wine wall, the name I have given to the space where wines are put on display, probably has the greatest number of SKUs of any single section of an upscale grocery store. I have been trying to figure out what works best for wine for quite some time, but I am still a bit stumped. All the Post cereals here, all the Chex products over there. That’s because most of the products are organized by producer. The corn flakes are found here, there, and elsewhere, not all in one spot. Over in the breakfast cereal aisle an entirely different geography applies. What’s the best way to organize supermarket products to facilitate consumer purchases? Over in the canned vegetable aisle, the system is pretty simple.
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