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I called Wally’s Wine yesterday, looking for some Antinori Tignanello to take to my in-laws for Christmas. We had tried the wine on our honeymoon and I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to introduce the wine to them. When I talked to the Wally Wine rep, he was helpful and even suggested some other Super Tuscans which can be had for a lower price than the Tignanello.

When I got to the store today, however, the friendly salesmanship seemed to have disappeared. The store was admittedly busy, people were scurrying about, picking up wine gifts and treats for the holidays. The sales staff, however seemed to show little interest in guiding their customers. I tried to make eye contact and even waved my hand at one uniformed employee, to no avail. I finally cornered three employees who were behind the refrigerated counter and asked if one of them could help me out. One of them said “sure” and then just sort of stared at me.

I held up the Tignanello, which at $80 is certainly not the most expensive bottle in the store, but also isn’t a cheap bottle. I hoped that this would help the salesperson understand that I was interested in spending some money and that he would guide me to some other choice wines.

I explained that I had tried the Tignanello on my honeymoon and that it was a new blend of wine to me and that I was interested in trying some like it. “Sure” he said again, without much more emotion and high tailed it over to the Italian Red section. I hurried to keep up with him and he briskly said “here’s a good one, the Fontalloro, and this one’s good too”. He started to walk off, but I wanted to ask a few more questions, such as if there was a way to tell if a wine meets the “Super Tuscan” standard just by looking at the label. He may have misunderstood me, but he gave me a very quick answer that “Tuscan wines are from that region, and they are labeled Toscana and could be a blend of grapes.” Before I could follow up, he started moving away from me and I was getting the impression that I had squeezed out all of the information I was going to get.

Somewhat defeated, I decided on the Tignanello, the Fontalloro and two other lower priced Antinori wines. I plan to taste test the lower priced Antinoris to see if I personally can tell the difference and if I can get the same enjoyment from the wine at a much lower price.

A bit disappointed, I sidled up to the cash register and paid a fair bit of cash for my four bottles of wine (which I am very much looking forward to drinking). As I was signing my credit card slip, a woman next to me was asking to speak to a manager. What follows is a rough transcript of what took place:

Woman: “I just wanted to let you know that we’re not happy with our experience here”
Manager: “I’m sorry to hear that ma’am, can you tell me what happened?”
Woman: “Well, this is the first time we came here, we spend alot of money on wine, we spent $500 today and spend thousands a month. We couldn’t get anyone to help us and when we checked out, our wine was just thrown in the bag and not really wrapped up”
Manager: “I apologize, but you can see the store, we’re very busy today”
Woman: “I can see that, but that doesn’t excuse how we were treated, we spent $500 today”
Manager: “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I can do”
Woman: “I spent $500 today, it would be nice if you treated me like a good customer…”

It went back and forth like this until I left the store. The woman must have said “$500″ more than a half dozen times and the manager basically said, we’re busy, take your wine and split. I can’t say that I disagree with the woman, for a higher end wine shop, I felt like service was low end.

Unfortunately Colorado Wine Company is too far for me to pop into, but after my Wally’s Wine experience, I’m thinking that it’s worth it to do some more exploring before going back to where I went today.

And as a side note, when I was back by the refrigerated area, one of the employees was complaining that a shipment of caviar from earlier this week had sat in an office all day because no one knew that it needed to be refrigerated. I hope none of them hatched!

Wally’s Wine
2107 Westwood Blvd. Los Angeles, Ca 90025
310.475.0606
Hours: 10:00 - 7:30 M-Sat & 10:00 - 6:00 Sun

By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.