The mystery of great wines that aren't on the shelves
The Rhys 2006 Pinot Noir Swan Terrace,
from the Santa Cruz Mountains, is as delicious a New World pinot as
I’ve ever tasted. It tastes like tiny wild berries on a rocky
promontory and smells like the deep forest, with beautiful balance and
a long finish. It’s a really gorgeous wine.
And you can’t buy it here.
Just
up the road from Rhys, Bob and Jim Varner are also making terrific
wines. Their chardonnays, in particular, are masterful expressions of
restraint; the usual California recipe of anonymous citrus fruit,
butterscotch, and toast is nowhere to be found. In their place are a
strong core of minerality, acidity, and purity. These are wines built
to age.
Now, those you can buy here. Theoretically. But you’ll probably never see them on store shelves.
Is there some sort of oenophiles’ black market of which you’re not aware? No, not exactly. But there is
a big world of highquality wine that moves almost entirely through
the shadows, as far as everyday consumers are concerned. Most of these
producers simply don’t have enough wine to populate retailers’ shelves,
which means they can’t interest distributors (who, thanks to ever
escalating consolidation, are less and less enthused about the work
necessary to promote microscopic wineries).
So what’s one of
these small producers to do? Well, one solution is to find a similarly
small specialist importer or distributor. These have sprung up almost
everywhere in reaction to the behemoth alternatives, and there are
quite a few in Massachusetts. While they’ll never have enough wine to
break into the massmarket racks at your local Keg Korner, they’ll
instead cultivate a few sympathetic restaurants and equally
specialized retailers who will get the entirety of their stock. From a
consumer standpoint, this is great if you happen to patronize those
restaurants or live near that one shop in, say, Millis. But if not, how
do you acquire the wine?
First, find out who, if anyone,
carries the wine in your state. The easiest way is to contact the
producer, and sometimes this information will be on their Web site,
though the smallest producers often don’t even bother to create one.
Admittedly, this can be difficult if the producer is in, say, Slovenia
and you don’t share a language. This will lead you to an importer or
distributor, depending on where the wine’s from, and the distributor
knows who they’ve sold the bottles to. A caveat, however: big
distributors aren’t always thrilled to receive calls like this, while
oneperson operations might require some persistence to reach.
Patience and politeness, in both cases, pay off.
Alternatively
(and you’ll need to do this eventually, anyway), cultivate the
acquaintance of a specialist wine retailer — the one with shelves full
of wines you’ve never heard of, rather than all those cheap Aussies
with cute animals on the labels. They can order pretty much any wine
that’s available in the state, and they’re usually quite happy to do so
... or, at least, tell you why they can’t. They also have ways to find
out who carries a wine, if you’re stumped.
But that only works for wines that are actually sold in Massachusetts, like Varner. What about Rhys?
Many
small producers in the US and elsewhere in the New World (though not so
much in the Old) sell most or all of their wine via a mailing list,
whereby wines are purchased directly from the winery and shipped
directly to the consumer.
At least, this is what happens if
you live in a state other than Massachusetts. The politics of it are
too involved for this space (and on this subject I’m prone to wax
vituperative, anyway), but it basically comes down to this:
distributors don’t much like having their business circumvented by
direct sales, and thanks to the ...willing cooperation of state
government and the ... helpful acquiescence of shipping companies, it’s
not. At least, not legally.
Now — and this does not
constitute advice — I’ve heard rumors that there are people who receive
shipments of wine anyway. Not that I know any of these people, or
condone their lawbreaking, or fail to brush my teeth after every meal
and help old ladies across the street. Anyway, the rumor is that some
people have wine shipped to nearby states whose laws are not quite so
draconian (which states those are will differ from producer to
producer), sometimes even going as far as setting up a mailing address
at the offices of those very same shipping companies that won’t bring
wine into Massachusetts. But again, let me stress: I absolutely do not
know anyone who does this. Because that would be wrong.
Thor Iverson can be reached at wine@stuffatnight.com.
