Graham's VP v. Graham's Finest Reserve VP?

[Bradley Bogdan]

I was wasting time on winebid while waiting for a client at work today, as I occasionally do to see what old bottles (aka most Bordeaux) are cheaper or at the same price as their modern, much too young to drink, counterparts. I, virtually, wandered over into the Portugal section and noticed there were 2 different bottlings (at very different prices) for Graham's '77 VP. One was labeled as I've always seen it, the other was labeled "Finest Reserve." Both were vintage dated. After looking around the site and the Graham's site for a bit and finding no mention of a "Reserve" level bottling for their VPs (like Noval's Nacional) I decided to ask you all what's going on there? I've included the links to the bottles below:

http://www.winebid.com/Item/3863982

http://www.winebid.com/Item/3863349

Thanks in advance for your educational input!

[Derek T.]

Bradley,

This is purely an issue of the words on the label. The wine in the bottle is the same in each instance.

Quite a few shippers have used the words Finest Reserve (or similar) on their VP labels but I believe it is no longer allowed now that a category of Port exists that bears the name "Reserve" or "Reserva".

Incidentally, the second label looks like a facsimile produced by someone other than Graham's, or could be from a special batch released for a particular purpose such as a tasting event.

Derek

[Glenn E.]

The estimates for those bottles make no sense.

The first listing has 2 available and is estimated at $65-80.

The second listing has 3 available and is estimated at $150-160.

Without knowing about both lots, in the first case I would assume that the price is per bottle but in the second case I would assume that the price is for a single lot of 3 bottles. I wonder which it actually is?

65 seems low for a G77, but 150 seems high. Normally I'd expect a 750 to be in the $100-115 range.

[Eric Menchen]

The prices are for single bottles in both cases. I don't know why so much in the second. I was thinking that "Finest Reserve" was a crusted, but sit corrected. I am reminded of the 1985 Burmester which sometimes is listed as "Extra Selected," but is all the same stuff.

[Bradley Bogdan]

Yeah, I had a suspicion that they might've been two different labels (as Smith-Woodhouse has had) for the same vintage, but the price difference seemed to indicate otherwise. Thanks for the input!

[Roy Hersh]

There are times when bottles are produced with a different label this way so that a client can skirt around posting laws in particular states to obtain more advantageous pricing. Back in my days as purchasing director for a restaurant chain, I had to implore wineries to put the words "special select" on their label for high volume wines sold to us, so that distributors could then sell these virtual "BOB" wines solely to our company at a negotiated price mandated to them (the distributor) through contracts between me and the winery. Lots of small companies wound up playing this game in order to get their wines on to "corporate mandated lists by-the-glass" but even the big companies like Mondavi were willing to do the same.

Please know that I am not suggesting that is the case with the Graham's you mentioned, just showing you an example of how some of these labels can wind up different.

[Eric Menchen]

And for Port bottles there are different releases, which I think is the case for some of the SW labels. Old labels were just black and white. Newly released bottles, even from old vintages, get the colored labels. I don't remember which wine it was, but I recently opened a pre-Internet vintage, but the label had a web address on it. This doesn't concern me because I know there are stacks of old bottles sitting in the lodges.