Wed, 15 June 2016, 8:01 am: My innate civility almost always restrains me from drinking whiskey at eight in the morning, but it does not preclude me from price-checking whiskey at eight in the morning.
Our comfortable layover at the Dusseldorf airport (DUS) allowed me to poke through the aisles of several shops on premises. Of the most interest to me was the one with the large selection of alcohol. (If you were taking a class in streamlining text and were instructed to remove the least necessary sentence in this post, we both know the one you’d chop.)
These one litre bottles of Jack and his cinnamon sister are 26,50 E. apiece, $29.72 at press time. (I love how “press time” around here is the exact second I hit “upload.”)
Have you ever found Jack in a one litre bottle here in the States? Generally Jack at US retail is in 750 ml and 1.75 L bottles. Once in awhile you’ll see the 375 ml size, in brown paper bags on park benches or inside the bottom desk drawers of middle school reading teachers.
The American 1.75 L goes for $40.00 – $50.00 at our mass retailers, while the 750 ml comes in at $20.00 – $27.00. My on-the-spot math told me these German airport litre bottles were not a super value.
This whole section is wine. Booze occupies the entire interior wall of this store— which is actually its only wall. The rest of its floor plan is open; it’s just about dead center of the terminal, so anybody walking from one gate area to another is probably going to pass through this store.
This is a good deal right here: 10,95 E. ($12.28) for a regular size bottle of a Dornfelder wine, a type we greatly enjoyed in Rudesheim last summer. That’s slightly higher than the price of a decent bottle of domestic wine in Florida, and we like it more than many wines easily available back home.
But the cost of a souvenir isn’t just the financial. You’ve got to factor in the physical and the practical.
This is the beginning of our trip. Seriously, Team Matt Take Me just got off the plane. Anything we add to our baggage now is going to stay with us for a long time. If we buy a couple of bottles of this velvet-textured, dark-skinned grape-sourced yumminess, we’ll be lugging them onto our connecting flight to Venice, onto our boats en route to the hotel, and then on to our subsequent locations. They are not lightweight, and they are breakable. That’s an unpleasant combination when you’re traveling.
Despite the value for money, there’s no way buying any of this wine right now makes sense. Sure, we could drink some or all of it at our Venice hotel and not have to carry it around after that, but we want to drink what’s available locally. Venetians are known for their specialized cocktails and sippables. You only need to BYOB if there’s no good hooch on site. And if we really want some of this wine later, we can probably find it back home. If it’s produced in quantity enough to stock an airport shelf, it’s likely also manufactured for export. A chain like Total Wine or ABC can possibly order it.
Now, if these bottles were on markdown for 5 E. each, that’d be different. For a deal that’s merely good instead of great, though, you’ve gotta know when to walk away. (You might recognize that Kenny Rogers line, even though you’d never recognize Rogers’ face anymore.)