When I started writing this post, I titled it “Ten Biggest Wine Client Misconceptions” but the post was getting so long I renamed it “Five…” and now we’re down to three. I think this will be an ongoing post topic, because really there are so many…and they persist.

I love my clients. They are eager, passionate and ready to plunge into the wine industry with the enthusiasm of adventure seekers who are about to turn a love of wine into a career. They come from all walks of life and their plans and goals are as disparate as their personalities, but they have one thing in common: their desire to enter the wine industry exceeds their knowledge of how to proceed. Okay, two things in common: they usually experience some confusion about what is involved and what it all means. It is no wonder. The U.S. is a quagmire of regulations and a morass of rules. It takes time and experience to begin to understand how to navigate these waters and as they embark on their new venture, they have neither.

These are in no particular order and do not apply to everyone, but are common enough to be included:

#1 Misconception -You can be all things to all people in the wine industry.

In other words, importer, wholesaler, retailer, restaurant, wine bar, tasting room…and so on. At least in most states, with a few exceptions for special circumstances and wineries in particular, you cannot be both wholesaler and retailer. This dates back to the Tied House Rules of England. There are definitions for this law on the ttb.gov site and variations in every state, but in its simplest form its intent was to prevent alcohol sales monopoly. In the UK, this resulted when a brewery also owned the pub and required that only that brewery’s beer was poured and sold, creating a pub that was “tied” to the brewery. Tied House rules were adopted in the U.S. following Prohibition at the same time it created the 3-tier system, which kept each level separate and distinct, in an attempt to avoid monopolies, regulate sales, ensure the collection of taxes and maintain their autonomy from the Federal government.

“Okay,” says one, “I want to be an importer and a distributor and have a tasting room in Washington. Is that okay?” No, it’s not. The importer and distributor are both wholesale operations, so that’s fine, but the tasting room is considered a retail enterprise. “But a winery does it!” Yes, that’s the exception. A winery has an outlet for the sale of the wines they produce, under a different license. You are not a winery. And besides, in the state of Washington you would be a Beer and Wine Specialty Shop with an Add-on Endorsement allowing you to sell tastings as long as at least 50% of your sales are in bottles. Yes, I know it’s confusing, but that’s their law.

That particular client is certainly not alone in his dilemma. It is such a difficult concept to get one’s head around. In fact, none of these laws really make a lot of sense. They sprouted as a reaction to the end of Prohibition, the fear of intemperance and a desire by the States to get their fair share of taxes, and have persisted and grown, like kudzu, as the decades rolled by and pressure was applied from one faction or another on legislatures, to protect their self-interests. We live with it, we build our wine businesses within it, and gradually it gets chopped back to make it manageable and perhaps even workable.

#2 Misconception – The U.S. is one big, happy licensing country

Oh, how I wish that were so! Fifty different states, fifty different sets of laws. Not variations, not detours in one part or another – fifty different sets of laws. It would take forever to go into the differences between Franchise States and Control States and hybrids of each, ones where direct shipping is freely allowed and others where it remains a felony, which state requires reams of paperwork, a 90 day processing period, fingerprinting, a hefty bag of gold and your first born child, and which one has nothing much except a signature (the last one is part of the Wild West – don’t you yearn for those simpler times?)

“I think I’d like to be a distributor in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida for starters.” Um, no. Firstly, you can only be a distributor in a state in which you have a brick and mortar facility – licensed, bonded and replete with all the accouterments that are required to service the state’s retailers, such as salespeople, delivery trucks, warehouse, an office where paperwork is completed and filed, invoices are sent and money collected, etc. You cannot drive willy-nilly across state lines to deliver to other states. That would not comply with their laws and they are unlikely to collect their portion of taxes.

“Well, I’ll set up in South Carolina and appoint someone in Georgia. I called someone from the phone book the other day and he seemed interested.” Good god, no. You must thoroughly vet whoever you appoint in this state. Georgia is one of the more severely restricted franchise states, where you sacrifice your wines at the altar of the state’s distributors and never, ever get them back. That’s only a slight exaggeration. Of course, there are some fine, ethical distributors in this state, but if you appoint a distributor in Georgia and decide they are not doing a satisfactory job, even if they do not sell the wine, even if they do not pay you, even if they set out to sabotage and undermine your brand in the market, it does not matter. The franchise laws protect them. The only remedy in this case is to get a letter of release from the distributor (which they can refuse, or demand compensation), appeal to the GA Department of Revenue’s arbitration or stay out of Georgia for two years.

Yes, it’s a jungle out there.

#3 Misconception – Hey, presto, we find the wine, we bring it in and we sell it

Yes, that’s how I’d like it to work too. Whether we’re a producer, supplier, importer, wholesaler or retailer, we all spend a great deal of time on whatever pursuit is in our purview – growing, winemaking, sourcing, buying, shipping and storing. In the case of the foreign supplier or exporter or the new U.S. importer, they look at the U.S. as one giant conglomerate of wine-drinking potential and say, “300 million people in the U.S. I only have a few thousand cases. That will be a drop in the bucket to that population. Let’s get started” Well, unfortunately this is what every other person before them thought too, with the result that there are millions of cases of wines from all origins, at all price points and all clamoring for attention.

I know these well-meaning individuals all come with the best of intentions – at least the ones who find me. They have connections to the land or the wineries, they love learning about wine, they found remote regions with esoteric wines, or they have a new idea. I understand that. I really do. And it can be done, despite the oceans of wine, because other people don’t plan ahead or they price inappropriately or mismanage their business and they fail. The trick is to take the nebulous image of what someone would like to achieve and turn it into reality. Doing due diligence first and approaching it as a very serious business, not as an idle pursuit where you throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

I always advise people to bring in smaller amounts of items that may have a harder time selling, and consider many things like seasons and vintages and their particular market. As an importer, is this the whole country or one or two states? What is the makeup of the state you’ve chosen to set up in as a wholesaler – population, tastes, ethnicity, general wine competition, competition in your region and price point, licensing requirements, for example. What do you enjoy doing? What plays to your strengths? How big or small do you really want to be? How involved? Do you enjoy front of the house or behind the scenes (and this applies to more than restaurants.)

The other factor is time. It takes far longer than anyone anticipates setting up whatever shape this new business is going to take, sort of like when you remodel your house. You have to plan for contingencies. If you are setting up on online selling business, make sure you don’t send your email blast prematurely, promising your customers a delivery date, until you can be assured it is in your warehouse or on its way. If you have a retail store site, make sure all the appropriate zoning requirements and ABC licenses (or state equivalent) are in place before you announce an opening. For importers or foreign wineries, the timeline has to be tracked back to the winery and the negotiations over the wines, purchase prices, quantities, payment terms, currency, to submitting U.S. compliant label graphics for approval by TTB (Alcohol Tobacco Trade Bureau), having wines bottled and labeled, finding suitable ship dates, arranging containers and clearance and getting it into the warehouse. That’s if the wine makes it to port on time, the ship doesn’t hit a snag along the way, or…oh, you get the point. Just make sure to plan for contingencies and tick every box along the way.

I love my clients. They come from every walk of professional life, spanning an age group from mid 20’s to late 60’s. Their experience ranges from none to 30 years in wine retail, with available investment capital from bare bones to bountiful. They live in all time zones from different backgrounds, with big ideas and small. But each and every one wants to start out the right way in the wine business and one of the first steps is clearing away that mist of misconceptions.

It is exactly 20 years ago this week that I flew British Airways Concorde back and forth from JFK toLondon. I don’t know what made me think of the anniversary. It’s not as if I was marking time to commemorate the event and waited patiently for the right moment. It just occurred to me today, of all days, and from there I went to check the dates on my certificate. My outbound flight was April 24, 1992 and I returned April 30, 1992.

I kept a file of memorabilia, with menus, wine lists, boarding passes, stationary, luggage tag and a grey leather man’s wallet, embossed with the Concorde logo. Flight attendants handed a gift pack on every flight. I gave one wallet to my husband and the other I kept unused and in pristine condition. Gifts also included Belgian chocolates and grey leather portfolios. Grey leather was the signature of Concorde interiors.

I took a couple of other ‘souvenirs,’ a tiny Wedgewood salt cellar, and the silver plated knife, fork and spoon from my dinner service. No plastic utensils back then. I still have everything. The Concorde is gone now and these are part of my treasured memories.

Menu and wine list

I was traveling alone, having saved up frequent flier miles for this trip, one of my early bucket list items. Somehow, I expected to recognize several of my fellow passengers from the pages of magazines or movies, surreptitiously glancing around in the private lounge before takeoff to catch a glimpse of a familiar face. But it was not to be. I’ve seen more celebrities on the streets of Manhattan. They all seemed to be businessmen, blasé regulars who buried themselves in newspapers as soon as they’d settled in, holding their glass up in a languid hand for refills.

The flights themselves were less than memorable for comfort, with cabin space sacrificed to supersonic flight, but it didn’t matter, at least not to me. It was still a heady experience, soaring into the air at a steep climb and eventually reaching Mach 2 – twice the speed of sound – noted in a lighted display on the bulkhead. Space was more than compensated for with immaculate service from flight attendants, superb food that included caviar tartlets, crawfish, Alaskan crab, excellent cheeses and an exclusively French wine selection. The consultants for the wine selections at that time were Michael Broadbent, MW and Hugh Johnson. Here is a sampling from the 17 wines on the list:

Champagne Pommery Cuvée Special, Louise Pommery 1981

Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, La Grande Dame, 1985

Taittinger, Comtes de Champagne, 1982 Blanc de Blancs

Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru, 1986 Labouré-Roi

Domaine de Chevalier 1983, Grand Cru Classé Graves, Léognan

Château La Lagune, 1982, Grand Cru Classé, Haut-Médoc

Château Lynch-Bages 1982, Grand Cru Classé, Pauillac

And Pommard Cuvee Billardet, 1985, Hospices de Beaune, with this description:

British Airways bought this top-of-the-line Pommard at the annual auction of the wine of the Great Medieval Charity Hospital of Beaune in 1985. The warm vintage weather had produced rare intensity of colour, richness of aroma and potency of flavour. Great red burgundy such as this can achieve an almost alarming headiness with such a smooth glide down the gullet that the locals call it “velvet trousers.”

1992 was the start of my wine importing career and in retrospect I wish I’d had more exposure to vintage champagnes and fine Burgundies and Bordeaux before a trip like this, to truly appreciate them, but there is no doubt I appreciated the opportunity to samples wines of this range and caliber. There are those who will say that a plane going Mach 2 at 30,000 feet may not be the ideal environment for the palate, but I could think of no better ambiance for this experience!

On March 6, 2012 the Gourmand Awards were held at Les Folies-Bergère in Paris, the Grande Dame of old theatres, dating back to 1890. Now in its 17^th year, the Awards is the brainchild, and continuing labor of love, of Edouard Cointreau. The Awards and subsequent four day Paris Cookbook Fair are designed to recognize the efforts of cookbook and wine book authors and publishers. In all, there were 163 countries participating for 2011, numbering thousands of entries.  

When I received notice, three months ago, that I had won “Best Professional Wine Book USA” I was stunned. I wasn’t even aware that I had been entered. When I learned that I was short-listed for “Best Professional Book in the World” I was truly gratified, but felt out of my league when I saw the competition from Italy, Czechoslovakia and France. Ultimately, Italy’s “Illustrated Historical Universal Ampelography” won that category, but I came in runner up, which was quite thrilling and wholly unexpected.

Professional World Wine Book Winners

I traveled to France to attend the finalist awards and it was well worth the effort. The evening was a seamless and professional gala with around 1,300 people in the audience of the theater, a red velvet and gilt nineteenth century classic. Hosted by Edouard Cointreau on stage at a podium, it began with wine awards, followed by cookbooks and special recognition for books published to support charitable causes and fundraising. The range of cookbook categories was even more extensive than wine, with exotic offerings from Australia, Patagonia, Malaysia, India, Sweden, Tibet, China, France and everywhere in between. The finalists all looked like books I wanted to read!

At the conclusion, a festive champagne reception was held in the lobby with Grosset champagne from Cointreau’s own family, poured by Le Cordon Bleu students in starched white hats, also part of the Cointreau family legacy. 

Folies-Bergere lobby post show

The following day, I gave a talk about wine importing in the USA on the first day of the Paris Cookbook Fair, signed a few books and thoroughly enjoyed myself with a seemingly appreciative audience. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that wine was flowing freely during the talk. 

The rest of the well-attended show was going on all around us – cooking demonstrations with chef celebrities, foreign book rights negotiations, amid displays of new food items and finalists books from the Awards. It had all the feel of a broad market professional book fair in the US, Frankfurt or London, and is certainly a testament to the hard work and dedication of Edouard Cointreau and the staff of Gourmand International and Gourmand Magazine.

Paris Cookbook Fair with the publisher

The experience motivated me to continue work on another book, one I hope will be in contention for an encore performance at the Gourmand Awards, but the next time it would be nice to win Best in the World category so that I can give a speech on stage. I had one all prepared in French, just in case, and I’d like to think it won’t go to waste!

Part of the appeal of wines has always been the connection people want to make to its origin. Wine regions are picturesque settings, often in exotic locations that conjure up an idyllic image – Tuscany, Burgundy, Bordeaux, Mosel, La Rioja, Napa – to name a few. Entire vacations are planned around these destinations, with the prospect of staying at a quaint inn, touring dozens of wineries to sample their wines and the local delicacies, watching sunsets over the vines and soaking in the local history. 

What happens when your brand doesn’t have history? When you don’t even have a region, much less a vineyard. That isn’t so unusual if you’re a huge brand, sourced from everywhere and sold purely on price. No one expects a story; they expect drinkable wine at a bargain.

But what if you started a new label without all the built-in romance, or the built-in volume distribution channels, but you wanted to stand out from the crowd anyway and find a point of connection?

I was sitting in on a ground floor meeting of just such a brand the other day. The founder is new to the wine industry, she has her inaugural vintage, and is filled with passion for a really unique concept. She knows where she wants to go, but not yet how to get there. There was a lot of brainstorming at that meeting and a good deal of talk about ‘branding’ and telling the ‘story’. The founder looked up uneasily at one point and said, “But we don’t have a story.” I emphatically disagree. I believe there is a story behind every wine brand that can allow it to stand apart, despite a lack of history and regional significance. Perhaps it’s a nascent story that evolves over time, but if there is passion and dedication behind the venture, it can be as compelling as any other.

Stories are really about people after all. Who they were and how the area came to be developed, what influenced the architecture, which grapes they selected for the climate and soils, winemaking choices, generations of families and their struggles and triumphs. Geography is important to the ambiance, of course, but without the individual lives and collective history of the area’s people, it could be any place. 

Holy Expletive came into being because its founder was walking through the wine aisles of Costco one day and the idea came to her out of the blue. Okay, as a beginning it’s a little lackluster. But she didn’t let it rest there. She actually did something about it. Without any experience in the industry, in a very short time she found the right people to make the wine, create graphics and logo, secure the licenses, obtain label approval and build a whole social media marketing campaign. That’s just the start of her story. Some of those who were sitting at the table have already contributed to this enterprise and will continue to move the vision forward and become part of the narrative through their actions and their innovative marketing ideas.  

Holy Expletive wines

But the founder has taken it further and developed a concept around the idea of a label on which anyone could write their own story, and even provided the tools (little black markers on every bottle.) Now we’re getting somewhere and there’s no telling where it will lead, but holy cow, I bet it will make for a good story!

Wine tanks at Western Australian vineyard

I come to this topic with a bit of hesitancy, because whilst I love being the recipient of good news and reviews, I don’t necessarily want to be the one to bring it to everyone’s attention. In this case, “everyone” might not be such a big deal, since my blog is so new its tiny green shoots have barely broken ground. Yet trepidation wars with the necessary art of self-promotion in the current publishing milieu.

When I wrote the first book on wine importing in the U.S., and expanded any previous work on wine sales and distribution, it was with a view to truly giving anyone who wanted to know, a ground level view of how it all worked. I brought my (at that time) eighteen years experience as an importer to bear on the project, but I also researched a great deal before I started, to discover what was out there. Was I really breaking new ground, simply adding to the dialogue or in danger of rehashing old material? Incredibly, I found nothing at all on the subject of wine importing.

It made me wonder. The answer could well lie in its seeming lack of broad appeal. Perhaps it wasn’t considered sexy enough to attract the masses. The current crop of titles includes ideas that titillate and draw the reader into hedonistic pursuit. They promise mouth-watering wine and food pairings, the world’s most expensive wine, the world’s best bargains, uncovering fraud and being invited into Grand Chateaux. 

I also arrived at my own conclusion that the dearth of subject matter had something to do with preserving the mystique of the wine industry and that those within in it were loath to divulge its secrets. I can’t say whether this was from fear of losing cachet or to discourage competition, but the question most often asked of me when I said I’d written this book was, “Aren’t you afraid that if you give away all your secrets you only encourage your own competition?”

The answer to that question and one I truly believe is, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The best possible way to improve this profession is to provide the newly minted importer with the right tools from the beginning. It also pulls back the curtain on aspects that the average person may find intriguing, and hopefully their curiosity will be rewarded. I left nothing out, held nothing back – at least from my own experience – in my desire to provide a blueprint for anyone who wishes to follow it and I find my efforts have been rewarded. I have been the recipient of many appreciative emails from individuals who seem to have found what they were looking for between its pages.

In addition, I discovered this week that Wine Spectator’s Executive Editor, Thomas Matthews recently reviewed my book for the December 31^st issue of the magazine. Since many people do not have a subscription, I have printed it in its entirety below:

How to Import Wine: An Insider’s Guide

By Deborah M. Gray (Wine Appreciation Guild, 328 pages, $29.95)

In a previous life, I aimed to be a wine importer. I got so far as to assemble a group of small Bordeaux châteaus willing to work with me, and had a professional in the field evaluate them.

“These are good,” he told me. “You can probably sell them. How many cases can you get?”

“Two or three hundred cases of each,” I replied.

“That’s a start,” he responded. “But what is your 50,000-case brand? You need that, too.”

That’s when I decided to be a wine writer instead.

I wish I had had Deborah Gray’s book at hand during my wine importing days; I might have saved myself time and money. I’m sure that many other wine lovers dream of becoming wine importers, too. For them, this book is essential reading.

It doesn’t pretend to be a roadmap to success; there is no such thing. But it raises many questions and suggests possible answers that any would-be importer must resolve before success is possible. Gray’s personal story-told in short, often painful, anecdotes scattered throughout the book-give graphic evidence of the value of thinking ahead. Read it as you drink, and make sure you look before you leap.
-Thomas Matthews

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I was struck with the word “painful” Matthews chose in connection with my anecdotes. Were they really that excruciating? Did I suffer so much as I blindly stumbled around in the early and not so early days? Looking back, I can see that I did. I just didn’t know any better. Hopefully, the “pain” I endured, and lived to write about, will help others avoid their own.