What we deal with (the unglamorous side of being a wine importer!)
(Originally Posted 12-26-07)
I was feeling guilty about not having written in a while. Certainly it is not for a lack of things to talk about. Every day in this business is an education. It is just that sometimes it is a very frustrating education. And certainly there is not much that is more frustrating as a general category than logistics.
The fun part of this business is discovering great wine, meeting passionate people, visiting and learning about the geography and history that makes for great wine, finding the unexpected and serendipitous food pairing, turning people on to something they haven’t tasted before or heard of before, seeing a worthy brand become known….that end of this work is what propels us onward and involves us in a way with which we will never tire.
And then there is the small problem of getting the wine here!
Here’s just one example: our newest treasure: Azienda Agricola D’Ancona Passito di Pantelleria.
OK, granted this is somewhat of an extreme situation, but, unfortunately, not as rare as one would hope.
The island of Pantelleria is off the coast of Sicily but is in fact even closer to Tunisia than to Sicily. So one could say it is somewhat remote from the Italian mainland, but, well, it is after all still part of Italy, and certainly has a proud heritage and tradition, not to mention being a place that makes one of the most exquisite dessert wines in the world, a passito made from the Moscato di Alessandria grape, known locally as Zibbibo. We were excited to find something there that we thought would further enhance our portfolio.
We were introduced to the two sisters who are the moving force behind this winery at Vinitaly in April of 2007. It took only one taste for us to become very interested in bringing in their wine. I was hardly an expert on Passito di Pantelleria when I first tasted it, but it seemed to me to be more subtle, more balanced, more pure, more honest; in other words, more of a “Tesori Wine,” than any other Passito di Pantelleria I had tasted before. After receiving a few samples and tasting them with a few of our key trusted colleagues, to make certain we were not crazy, we decided to move forward. (We have since been told by several experts that it is probably the best Passito of Pantelleria they have ever tasted, and possibly the best one made - period..)
The first thing one has to do is get label approval. There are a whole list of things that must be on the label, including the infamous “Government Warning,” the name of the importer, the alcohol percentage, etc., and there are a series of specifications making clear exactly how those things are to be written, including the size of the letters (for example, the alcohol percentage has to be in letters no smaller than 1 mm high and no larger than 3 mm high, while other required elements need to be at least 2 mm high) But unfortunately, anything can come up as a reason for our government, in its wisdom, to reject a wine label.
We transmitted all the requirements to the winery, and they set about trying to modify their label to meet those requirements, as best they could understand them (we speak English and we still need a consultant to help us!), including re-writing the text on the back label in English (which for reasons too arcane to explain here is considered the official, or “front” label in this case). All this took some time, but finally we had a label that seemed to meet the rules, and we submitted it.
Then we wait of course - no way to know how long it will take before some clerk in the TTB office gets to it.
At the end of August (!), we finally learned that the label had been rejected. Why? Because in the text of the explanation of the wine, the winery said that the wine was made from the Moscato di Alessandria grape. Even though this statement was simply part of the text, because it was on the “front” label, and because it was the name of a varietal, it has to be larger than the surrounding text, or made to stand out in some way. So (to put it simply) we had wasted about 2 monthds and had to re-do the label, resubmit it, and wait again.
Finally, to our great relief, the label “passed” the second time around. It was now October and the winery could actually print the labels and apply them to the bottles destined for our shores. (Of course this meant laboriously removing the existing back labels from their existing bottles, because the TTB does not allow any labels to be stuck on top of existing ones!)
Now we could speak about getting the wine on a ship. Hah! It’s not exactly as if there is a truck that can pick up the wine on the island of Pantelleria and take it to the warehouse of our shipper in Livorno. It was too late to get the wine here in time for the holiday season, but, well, at least we could ship before the end of the year…and in fact, after a great deal of work on everyone’s part, a way was found to transport the wine from Pantelleria to Livorno. Our container was scheduled to depart on December 21, so of course there was plenty of time…
The wine finally left the winery on December 6, after a tremendous logistical effort to coordinate the transport via Sicily. In order for our container to depart on December 21, the wine had to be in Livorno by the 15th (new anti-terrorism rules require the container to be sealed at least 5 days before departure!).
However, on December 10th, a truckdrivers’ strike was announced all over Italy that lasted until the 14th! So our wine, after making it to Sicily, never left Sicily until the 18th! Meanwhile, having lost the departure on the 21st, we had rescheduled for the 31st, with a new closing date of Dec 24th. But as you might guess by now, the wine from Pantelleria did not quite make it up to Livorno before Christmas (bad weather, holidays, no sense of urgency on the part of the truckers….), and so now sits in Livorno waiting for us to combine it with additional shipments sometime in January.
By the time it gets here, it will have been a project nearly 11 months in the making, (during which time the dollar has lost another 10% of its value against the Euro). We hope we ordered enough, because, on top of everything else, we have a short window in which to ship the wine each year - there is no effective way of shipping from Pantelleria to Livorno in a temperature-controlled environment, and this is, well, nearly Africa - so we can basically ship between about October and April - May at the latest, if we do not want to worry about compromising the quality of the wine before it gets here (we always - without exception - use temperature-controlled containers from Italy to California).
Do we get paid back for this kind of Herculean administrative and logistical effort? Well, to be honest, only in one respect - the satisfaction we finally experience when you taste this wine for the first time, do a double-take, close your eyes, and are left momentarily speechless.
We wish that experience on you as soon as possible, but in realistic terms, it looks like you will have to wait at least until March of ‘08, at least with this wine!
The wait will, in this case, be worth it.
I wish you all a lovely holiday season, nurtured by some great wine, and a 2008 rich with new and enlightening experiences, at least most of them, hopefully, more pleasant than dealing with logistics!
Auguri per un felice anno nuovo!
Steve Bloom