Interesting to see he owns the brand, so he is paying himself for…?
Anyway, back to the champagne. Has anyone tried Ace of Spades Gold? How does its taste and price compare to more traditional high end champagnes?
Dennis
I would imagine it is much like all other “premium” Champagne mythology.
Supermarket budget brands regularly beat the big names in blind tasting and paying $1200 is no guarantee of getting a drink that is objectively better than something far cheaper.
In short, Jay-Z is likely not appreciating the quality of the Champagne but rather the ability to spend $1200 in the first place. I suspect you could swap his plonk for anything vaguely fizzy and he’d be happy.
I wonder what the wholesale price is on those. An average markup for regular wine at a bar is ~3x but I could see the markup on premium status stuff being higher than that. But the bar could easily be pocketing over $60k of that tab with $30k going back to Jay-Z’s company.
Frédéric Rouzaud, is that you posting? Seems that comments like that are what induced Jay-Z in the first place to get pissy at LVMH and then go purchase Armand de Brignac. I agree with you, FWIW, but see this recent article from ESPN about wine appreciation being the next trendy hobby amongst the NBA elite. NBA guys aren’t rappers, even though a lot of them seem to think they can, and the only rapper who I can think of being really good at basketball was Master P, and he’s more of a producer, but still.
There are certainly no end of musicians who’ve shared their love of the grape too. Also FWIW, I’d rather spend the money on the D’Angerville Taillepieds mentioned in the article, than any of the AoS line, from what friends have told me about the relative quality of AoS.
FWIW, winesearcher has AoS Gold Brut retail for an average of 283 USD a 750ml bottle, and 460-ish for the Rose Brut. Prices seem a skosh low, for what I vaguely remember seeing for it around Houston. But the 1200/bottle Gold and 2500/bottle Rose that Jay-Z paid from the article, is full-on strip club Champagne pricing. Or so I’ve been told…
Probably charged it back to his label as a business expense, though, IIRC, the recent IRC changes cut out a bit of the entertainment deduction one can take anymore. Oh well, it’s his money, not mine. I’m just thankful he and his fans haven’t decided to bid up wines I like.
Do bars/clubs buy it retail or wholesale? I would have assumed they’d have a distributor selling it cheaper than retail but, for a 350% markup, I suppose they could afford to run to the liquor store.
I figured that’s the same thing going on here. When celebrities drop this kind of money on bottles in clubs, what they’re actually paying for is privacy, security, service, and exclusivity.
I am not in the biz. My understanding is that retail sellers like restaurants and other entities that sell alcohol for on-premise consumption, are obligated to purchase alcohol from a wholesaler. I imagine this varies quite a bit by state.
References I’ve seen suggest that wholesale price for wine is ~2/3 that of retail. That’s probably way out of whack for a luxury good like AoS. When I worked hospitality, we charged about IIRC, double to triple retail for either Dom or Cristal for room service. 500 bucks is ringing a bell, but this was over a decade ago.
(As the night clerk, I often had to put together the room service order, and not incidentally, collect a large chunk of the 20% gratuity we added to the bill. I sold a lot of bubbly…)
Advertising.
What about this indicates who the customer is? Or if the receipt is real? Or wasn’t entered “in error” and cancelled out.
So yeah, $91,000 from his left hand to his right hand for a free commercial. I guess that’s good, right?