Wine Importing in the Time of Covid: Part Three
This week I decided it was time to start going to wine shops again. As it turned out, I was woefully behind the trend. For my Tuesday tasting at a hip local store, I watched as four separate reps "dropped in" without appointments to try and get the attention of the buyer over the course of like 40 minutes. They stood mulling around the front door, wine bags in hand, looking particularly menacing because of their masks. I was shocked. Here I was, thinking that I might be overstepping the mark by asking to taste at a specified time. For all I knew, the buyer was one of the 100+ million Americans suffering from melancholia, depression, news-fueled anxiety, social media addiction, other more gruesome addictions, insolvency, whatever, not to mention Covid. Was it even appropriate to try and solicit a sale or two? Apparently it was more than appropriate; it was a necessity. It started to become obvious why my emails in the previous week or two had gone largely unanswered by most buyers: they were busy fielding in-person visits of potentially infectious reps, in the literal and metaphorical sense, during a major pandemic.
I asked the buyer about it -- not about the extent of his personalized miseries, addictions, etc., but whether or not he felt okay about these people dropping in. He didn't mind, he said, but they were actually pretty well stocked in terms of wine and he was up to his ears with scheduled and unscheduled rep visits. I looked around the shop, gazing at the maybe-100 shelf spots for wine bottles. If every 40 minutes you have 4 unannounced drop-ins and 1-2 scheduled tastings, and each of these people carry 4-7 wines, then exactly how many wines are competing for a single spot on the shelf?
The next day, I visited another wine shop in my neighborhood. A tiny local establishment where the owner is always there, working behind the counter. It's actually one of my favorite places: it exists without pretense of any kind, which is rare for tiny wine shops, and it's sincere, evoking its owner's true passion for wine and not some grubby outerboro shop owner's preoccupation with the "bottom line." Wines are selected by someone who cares about wine, and he's tasted (and "drank" or maybe "downed" ) every bottle in the shop to be sure that you'd like it. He doesn't hide behind a mantra or ethos of winebuying, which I think for a lot of people is a convenient way to do as little work as possible. (Hiding behind absolutes might be the best way to feel good about being lazy, generally speaking.)
Empowered by the bold, reckless reps of the day prior, I went in without an appointment. We caught up, exchanged Covid-related travel stories, and I asked him how business had been. He said financially they were fine, they were getting sales, yes, but the sales were all of the same wines. "People just pick the same five wines from the cheapest shelf," he complained. "The rest of the selection doesn't move." He looked around sadly.
"I'm good on my Hungarian wines. I wish I had better news for you."
The next day, popping into a third shop also within walking distance from my house, the owner — who I've also known for years — basically echoed Robert. "Everyone buys the bottle of $25 Sancerre," she said quickly. "We have a $25 and a $30 Sancerre, and they only buy the cheaper one. It's crazy. Nothing moves in this whole store! I am sitting on rosé, really nice wines I found, Greek wines; I have been adventurous and no one is trying them." I could tell she felt bad, and I can't say I blamed her. Imagine you spent 15 years curating a wine shop filled with gems, your favorite finds, special items, basically the fruits of your labor of love, and everyone just runs in, automatically grabbing at the same stupid bottle of ungrateful Sancerre.
Everyone who's asked me how this year has been business-wise has pretty much said the same thing. "People are still drinking, right? So I bet you are doing well!" But no, I'm not doing well, and it's really more complicated for a million different reasons. Sadly it cannot be reduced to the idyllic conditional that if 100+ million melancholics exist, then the wine is a'flowin' and Palinkerie does well.
There are something like 26,000 restaurants in New York City alone. Those were places that, until a few months ago, could showcase and expose people to unknown, interesting wines like Hungarian wines. My customs broker tried our Hárslevelü by the glass at Gramercy Tavern and ended up emailing me about his experience, which really impressed him. A little rave review appeared in Wine Spectator years ago of our Juhfark after the author had tasted it at Betony. Wines of ours gained followings, especially those wines that were confusingly labeled or weirdly named, because people had the chance to taste them and hear about them in restaurants. With the closure, temporarily, completely or partially, of so many restaurants, this aspect of the wine culture has really taken a hit. The New York Times estimated that at least 1,000 NYC restaurants had permanently closed by September due to Covid. So even if people are consuming the same amount of wine, there are fewer places to try it and fewer selections to choose from. Every wine shop is trying to suddenly represent a wine market that used to involve thousands of additional outlets in New York City alone.
For restaurants that are open and offering dining options, people tell me constantly that things are not the same. "We are just trying to save enough money to survive the winter," one bar owner told me in August. And survival seems to be the top priority. Fewer guests are served than before. On the wine front, a former 10-case order is reduced to one case, and I'm asked to waive the delivery fee. Wines that wholesale at $17 are replaced across the board for wines that wholesale for $9. Not that I blame them in the slightest; it has been a brutal year for restaurants in particular, and I am happy to help them do anything they need to stay afloat. But that avenue of adventure and risk-taking is not available like it used to be. (And you can start to understand the fierce battleground of drop-ins and emails between wine people, desperately trying to sell their stuff in the places that have the budgets to buy big quantities.)
This leaves most people to fend for themselves, selecting wines from shops (where the shop is usually organized into categories like "Wines Under $15," "Staff Picks," "France," "Italy," "California," "Spain," and maybe "Other," nestled in a back corner), or, even worse, selecting wines from The Internet. It reminds me of the lamp I bought from The Internet, which looked so cool on instagram and arrived misshapen and defected, a far cry from the photoshopped ideal I had been sold. Its mid-century frosted glass shade sat precariously lopsided and sad on the wobbly metal beam for a few months until I finally gathered the courage to throw it away. It's not even the consumer's fault; it's overwhelming and confusing and exhausting to try and understand the millions of different wines out there. And how in the world could you know what a wine tastes like by looking at a photoshopped picture of the bottle online? I imagine the blind grab for the $25 Sancerre must be the result of something like what Don DeLillo called "brain fade," the inability to think in the presence of way, way too much information.
Another deeper issue is that those of us who specialize in unknown, unique, out-there foreign wines rely on the curiosity and open-mindedness of wine drinkers. But I wonder how "open-mindedness" would rate in American consumer behavior right now. Are people venturing beyond the little world they know? Or clinging to their group, their axioms and absolutes, trying to live by definitions to give some structure to their chaotic existences? Alienation and mistrust between people is high. You feel it on the streets, when you walk into a store, and of course you feel it big time on The Internet. Would people even take a sommelier or a shopowner's advice at this point? Maybe I'm being cynical, but a part of me wonders if they'd first need to assess whether or not you belonged to their tribe by your dress and instagram behavior before taking a chance on your wine recommendation. And even if you did, people are so quick to dismiss one another as evil, lying, bad, wrong. It's hard to see where all of this leads, and it's hard to know how to prepare your business for it.
The one thing I'm certain of is this. The wine industry — despite the ubiquity of The Internet and all of these cultural, economic, emotional and practical physical threats — is still an industry that thrives on real, in-person experience. It cherishes human communication and physical community. Wine is consumed in the physical space, best shared with friends or friendly strangers or loved ones. Wine is best sold in person, and best explained in person, too. For now, we are all trying to make it work — but for the small players in the wine industry, it is going to be a challenge until we can be represented in person again, without the threat of harming ourselves or others. We are too easily drowned out in the small shelf spaces of no-contact shops and in the plethora of data on a wine shop's website, where there's no "Hungary" tab in the "Wines by Country" index even though they carry ten SKUs of our wine. We can only hope that an in-person life is on the horizon, and that for American wine drinkers, taking risks and experiencing different wines can be a part of that unknown future.