Grocery Outlet Wine Sale, Nov 4-10, 2020

The Grocery Outlet wine sale runs from November 4-10, 2020. The Grocery Outlet is becoming well known for wine deals and prices are reduced a further 20% for all wines during the sale. One of the fun things about shopping at the Grocery Outlet is finding new things, since the stock is constantly changing. And this is especially true for wine because you really won’t know what you’ve found until you get home and try it 🙂

About half of my shopping time at the Grocery Outlet is usually spent in the wine aisle – and it’s always fun. Weighing up options like a risky $60 bottle of wine that’s reduced to $15 versus a $6 bottle that looks just as promising (but only reduced from $12). Of course, I rely on some research (Vivino is a good source of user-generated ratings for wine) but for some reason I never seem to get good phone reception in my local Grocery Outlet. Are stores made out of some special cellular-signal-blocking material to foil people from researching wine too much?! In this crazy year of ridiculous conspiracy theories I almost feel that I should point out that I was joking there.

But there’s a general sense of excitement about the wine at Grocery Outlet and I think it comes down to the unpredictability of the outcome. Many of the wines are good, some are dull, and a few turn out to be incredible (for the price). Then, if you discover (sitting at home, later on) that your $15 bottle of wine would have been a good buy even at $60 there’s also a second part to the adventure: Is the wine still at the store?! Because, of course, it may have taken you one or two weeks to get around to trying the wine and by then many others may have also discovered it.

Grocery Outlet Wine Sale – Recommendations?

Of course, the thrill of finding a good wine is amplified (and it’s hard to find amplified thrills during lockdown) if you can also go back and buy it during the Grocery Outlet wine sale – your $15 find is now $12, meaning you can buy four and cellar three of them. And by cellaring, I mean store in a wine box on the floor of your closet.

For finding leads on good wine, I recommend the WordPress blog, The magical world of wines from Grocery Outlet (aka, GrossOutWine) – The page titled What’s New?,  is a pretty active comment thread on wine finds.

So, last week I bought these two wines, knowing that the sale is about to start:

1. Cabernet Sauvignon from Experience, Napa, 2016. $15 at the Grocery Outlet, normally $25. This wine is rated 4.0 out of 5 by users on Vivino, which is pretty good. I find that most wines that score 3.8 or higher on Vivino are worth trying if the price is reasonable.
2. Barbera reserve from Sunce, Clear Lake, 2017 (St. Olof Vineyard). $10. This wine is limited – only 9 barrels were made. The 2018 vintage is listed at $34 on Sunce’s website.

I’m about to try them and will post comments below once I do.

Ethical ratings for wine?

Since the point of this site is to find ethical bargains, I’m going to try to get into the ethical side a little bit in future posts. Several of the wineries that I’ve been to around Napa & Sonoma have talked about their sustainability in some form. For example, check out Napa’s Honig winery for their sustainability stories on birds, bees, solar panels and sniffer dogs! They also offer an Eco Tour, which will hopefully resume post-lockdown.

Finding information on some wineries will be a bit tricky, so I expect that determining ethical ratings for wine will a bit more challenging than for food products. It has been a tough year for Napa and Sonoma though – along with having to deal with the pandemic and crazy president like the rest of us, they’ve also endured some of the worst fires in state history. So there are good reasons to support these wineries by buying wine from these regions. Of course, wine is very important for us, too, when dealing with the pandemic, wildfires, and crazy president. Cheers!