LOS ANGELES — Accidents happen, the people at the Accidental Wine Co. like to say. Good thing for them that they do, too, or the Accidental Wine Co. would be out of business.
Every time a delivery person, a vintner or wine distributor drops a case of wine and one bottle breaks, staining all the others, the sound heard in the minds of the people at Accidental Wine is not that of glass shattering. It’s more like the ka-ching of a cash register going off.
Accidental Wine rushes in and buys up the remaining blemished but otherwise unbroken bottles that a retailer won’t touch. Then it resells them over the Internet for a third to half off the price.
“We never know when an accident’s going to happen,” says Janice C. Lee, who carries the dual titles marketing director and master imbiber with the company she helped found two years ago.
“We never know what quantity we’re going to get.”
But get them Accidental Wine does. Everything from France’s most famous Bordeaux wines, which can go for hundreds of dollars a bottle, to acclaimed vintages from California’s Napa Valley, to more modestly priced but still enjoyable selections from places like Australia, New Zealand and Chile.
That’s because, as David Forbes, the company’s chief executive and grape wrangler, likes to say: “The expensive bottles break just as easily as the cheap ones.”
Indeed, sometimes they don’t even have to break.
Not that long ago Los Angeles’ venerable San Antonio Winery, in business for 103 years, decided to bring out a new label called Windbreak.
“It’s an outstanding wine. It’s 40-something dollars a bottle,” says Forbes, holding a Windbreak pinot noir.
But for some reason — and in retrospect it doesn’t take too much imagination to guess that reason — the name Windbreak never caught on. The winery has since changed it to something more marketable.
In the meantime, the winemakers didn’t want to dump their leftover stock, so they sold it to Accidental, which is packaging it with two other similarly priced vintages from other winemakers and selling all three for a total of $68, about half the price.
Then there was the Argentinian winemaker who produced 150 cases of a pinot noir before noticing someone had spelled it Pinor Noir on all the labels. Bob Castellani, president of importer-distributor Specialty Cellars quickly put in a call to Accidental Wine, which scooped up the bottles and resold them, with a note to consumers that it really was pinot noir they were getting.
“It worked for them, it worked for us and it certainly worked for their clients,” Castellani said of Accidental. The company, he added, is the only one he knows of in its niche market.
Because Accidental, like Forrest Gump with his box of chocolates, never knows what it is going to get, consumers who buy through its website can’t order specific brands. But they can specify what kind they want, a chardonnay, for example, or a merlot. Likewise, if they hate zinfandel or chianti reminds them of that creepy scene in “Silence of the Lambs,” they can say so and they won’t get any.
Forbes declines to reveal Accidental Wine’s sales figures but says in its two years the company has grown rapidly.
“We just happened to get in at the right moment,” he says as he stands between shelves crammed with bottles of wine. “Since the economy dropped, what we’re seeing is that people are looking to drink wine at the same level they did before, but not pay the same price.” Which keeps him and his partners busy.
