Duty free shops – where wine goes to die
I took the above photo at a Sydney Airport duty free store just this weekend gone.
I was wandering around looking at Champagne prices you see (Dom is cheap at the airport), and sauntered over to check out this bottle of 2008 Penfolds Bin 620 Cab Shiraz. I actually just wanted to have a poke around really, particularly as Penfolds know how to package their top rarities. Kicking the tyres I was.
What I saw though was all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong.
Forget the fact that the price is hardly ‘duty free’. Forget too how odd it is that such a wine is freely available, even though it was made in tiny quantities. Forget even that it’s sitting open in the middle of the store, that lovely box more marked and dog-eared by the day. None of it really matters, compared to one thing – that bright light beating down on the bottle…
Looking even closer again and it was obvious that the light wasn’t just bright, it was also radiating heat, to the point that the bottle was warm to touch. I was starting at a $1000 ‘icon’ wine, being slowly cooked underneath the bright spotlight of an uncaring, glorified perfumery. It was like watching a rare panda starve to death in a cage…
Of course a bit of heat may not worry your average shopper, particularly given that the wine will probably not be out there long. But it should. Such wine deserves better. Such wine prices should come with a higher expectation of provenance too. Or at least I think so.
Sadly, it wasn’t an isolated incident either…
For more evidence of what such shitty conditions can ultimately do to a cork sealed bottle of wine, let’s flash to what I saw at the Auckland duty free yesterday afternoon:
Pictured above are 5 bottles of the Stonyridge Pilgrim Grenache Blend (2010 from memory. Selling for $NZ95/bottle). You can’t see it all that well (I can spot my ugly mug in the reflection however), but each bottle had a different level of wine in it. A different level not because the maker intended it that way, but because these wines were also scorching away underneath another spotlight (check out that shadow on the left. Bright!), the wine in those bottles slowly seeping its way out and the juice literally cooking itself.
The problem? They’re 5 wines that will all taste completely different, and all unlikely to taste anywhere near as good as they should. 5 wines, $475 worth of quality, Rhone-styled Waiheke Island red that, yet again, have been ruined by the scourge of the spotlight…
What a sad waste of great wine, and a disaster with only one conclusion – approach the duty-free wine store with caution…
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