If you enjoy drinking wine, you will no doubt be used to special price promotions from wine discounters or wine warehouses selling ‘great wine cheap’ for often $4 or $5 per bottle. Without exception these wines are normally high volume products, or frankly, wines which should never have been made in the first place.

But what about the really good stuff – the wines which are normally $40, $50, $60, up to $100 per bottle and win all the accolades year after year? Why are these wines never slashed to clear excess stock? Well, the simple answer is that they are, and regularly, but you will NEVER see them.

SLOBs is an acronym for ‘slow moving or obsolete stock’. In the wine industry, the clearance and discounted wines frequently seen slashed are indeed SLOBs, however they are wines which have minimal or zero brand equity meaning that they are either regularly discounted in the retail wine trade or have no particular brand recognition.
So manufacturers discount them, often heavily, to make way for new vintages or new brands.

However, if you have a $120 bottle of red wine which represents the pinnacle of your winemaking and your brand, you can never slash the price to say $80 within the retail or independent chains because no one (retailers or the drinker) will ever pay the full price again. This would destroy the ability of the brand to generate income and thus destroys its value or equity.

However, these wines are regularly cleared at reduced prices to make way for new vintages – not into retail chains or warehouse discounters but into on-premise resellers. On-premise resellers include restaurants, wine bars and cafes who will happily pocket the extra discounts available as they always sell wine way above retail price anyway. This is a trade secret.