I had to wait a few days to write this one. First to cool off, and second to give the folks who prompted my ire a chance to explain.

Perhaps my favorite California winery (at least until this week) made an incalculable and inexcusable blunder. I've been buying Saxum wines via the mailing list for several years. I've written about how great their wines are several times in this space. No one -- not Sine Qua Non, Alban, Pax or Carlisle -- is making better Rhone varietals and blends than these guys, so I generally bought my full allocation.

Only apparently it wasn't an allocation. When I went to order wine this week, it was all gone; apparently it sold out in about two hours, so I was way late the next day. Whatever term they want to use for it, Saxum utterly over-allocated its wine. From the looks of the eRobert Parker boards, hundreds of other loyal customers got hosed. Owners Justin and Heather Smith have sent out a form apology that included this:

"Unfortunately, we under-estimated the demand we would receive during this release and all of the wines sold out quickly after the email was sent. "We set up Monday's release the same way we have in the past few years but instead of selling out in a few weeks we sold out in a few hours. At the moment we are working hard so that we can try to offer at least one bottle of each wine to our long time customers. To those customers, we'll be in touch later this week." It's now later this week, and I haven't heard anything more. I have no doubt that they are trying to do what they can, and that they are sorry. But this is a sorry saga in more ways than one. The wines offered got Parker scores of 99, 86-98+ and 98-100. Did the Smiths and their staff really think the demand would be anything but avid? "Well, duh" doesn't even begin to cover this. Yet they did nothing to serve or protect loyal customers who might not have had access to the Internet during those two hours. My friend Joe, a kinder and more forgiving soul than I'll ever be, thinks this is a just a massive screw-up, with no greed involved. I disagree. Again, this is somewhat about semantics, but in my worldview, when a company puts selling wine at 1-10 on its priority list and its longtime customers a poor 11th, there's greed involved. Even if this was pure thoughtlessness, having regular customers not be a part of your thought process entails greed. Saxum flat did not give enough thought to its longtime customers, and obviously had a buttload more wine "allotted" than it had available. On Wednesday, I sent an email asking for a phone call to allow the winery to tell its side of the story; no luck. On Thursday, I sent an email stating that the only way out of this mess was for saxum to have a "do-over," start from scratch and allocate the wine more smartly; the response: "Hi Bill, I'm sorry but we can't have a do over. Wine was purchased, credit cards were charged and that is the end of it. If the wine had been ordered but no payments had been made we could do something but since orders were placed and money was exchanged we can't. I'm terribly sorry. We're currently working to come up with something we can offer.
We are also going to change the way we offer wines. This was a huge wake up call for us. Best,
Sierra Slade Christensen Saxum Vineyards" Now I don't know much about legal issues, but I do know that Domaine Alfred had a "do-over" a few years back when the same thing happened and engendered tremendous goodwill. I also know that i have had my credit card charged for something I ordered that turned out to not be available, then had the charge refunded. Without a "do-over," there's nothing Saxum can do (and it promising to do something) to make up for this extraordinary bungle. Now of course, I'm a little more miffed because the wines got such high scores. But i was buying Saxum when it was getting "mere" 93s and 94s; I continued to buy it because the wine was so damn good. Not sure I'll be there if and when the scores dip back down to the mid-90s.