Delayed Gratification
Ever heard of the marshmallow experiment?
That’s where researchers brought a bunch of little kids into the lab and told them they would get a treat if they waited for the adult to come back. They measured how long the kids waited, and they came to a bunch of conclusions about a tiny group of preschoolers recruited from the nearby daycare almost entirely populated with the children of Stanford professors. (Not exactly what you call a representative sample.)
Anyway, let me tell ya. These kids ain’t got nothin’ on me.
I signed up several months ago for Full Pull Wines. It’s a service where they get special prices on certain wines, mostly from the Pacific Northwest. The thing I discovered after I started buying in June is they only ship during a prescribed shipping calendar, and I had just missed the spring window. I understand why they do this, since there’s no point in buying a special wine that’s going to get cooked in the back of a truck in mid-July.
So I get that I had to wait, but I did have to wait.
Until October.
Also they will not ship your wines unless it totals an entire case. So if you order three bottles here, four bottles there, they will not ship until you have a minimum of 12. If you run over 12? You gotta wait till you make up a new case.
Shipping costs an additional $55 on top of your wine purchases. I first started getting notified from UPS last Saturday, and it arrived from New Rochelle, New York on Thursday. (All wine in the U.S. needs an adult signature, to dissuade teenagers from buying online and waiting for the shipping calendar for several months. Rather than just getting someone with a fake ID to go buy a six-pack at the liquor store down the street.)
So finally I’ve got my wine! It arrived very well packaged (for $55 I would hope so) And how is it?
I started with a bottle of 2019 Château Bourdieu, a red Bordeaux blend, simply because I had ordered four bottles out of 12, so I have plenty left.
I got some blackberry and a lot of forest on the nose. That carried on to the palate too. The texture is nicely silky, and the tannins are firm but fade quickly. It’s incredibly quaffable, perhaps bordering on dangerously so. And it’s a hefty 14.5% alcohol, but it is remarkably balanced.
Now how’s the price? I’m a little not thrilled about this. Looks like on wine-searcher.com I could have gotten it from a store in upstate New York for even less. I haven’t done the math on the shipping to totally compare, but at least it’s not a wine that is in stock at stores within driving distance. And I can’t deny this is a great wine for the $14.99 I paid, more like $19.58 with shipping.
Full Pull says it’s going to open up more shipping and expand windows. I got some interesting wines, but I could probably find other similar things nearer to me at the same kind of price points. I don’t know that I’d wait (and wait, and wait) again to get my hands on wines I paid for months ago. And next time before I buy I’ll do more research on Wine-Searcher or Vivino to see how prices stack up.
That said, unlike wine clubs that have proprietary blends just for them, these are wines you can get at other outlets. So if you find one that sounds interesting or that you really enjoyed at an even better price or closer to home, you can purchase it easily. Also now that I know the prices might not be that huge a bargain, I’m going to focus on their Washington offerings. I do love Washington wines, and good quality ones are tough to get here in New Jersey.
I’ll let you know how it goes with the other bottles. Does this sound like something you’d want to check out? Let me know!