German Catalog 2006 USE THIS ONE.qxp - Michael Skurnik Wines

14
Belgium, and they immediately run out of wine. And let’s
say I have some excess inventory. Of course it makes
sense to “reallocate” that inventory. And here’s how it
should happen:
I contact Selbach offering him some of my wine if he
needs it for Belgium. Would he like to contact his Belgian
importer, or would it save him the trouble if I did so directly?
Here’s how it should not happen. I broadcast emails to
every retailer in Belgium offering them the wine, bypassing the
importer my partner wants to work with and ignoring any
wishes he has about how his wine gets sold. Some friend I am!
“It’s a BRAVE NEW WORLD, BAY-BEE; eat my dust!” Out of
one side of my mouth I’m pontificating about the “free market”
and touting my credentials as “consumer-champion” and out of
the other side I’m just a hyena scavenging for business because
I smelled carrion somewhere, blithely disregarding any norms
of courtesy toward a grower whose loyalty I asked for!
And I have the gall to say the other guy’s greedy.
There is only one true reason to defend gray-marketing,
and it’s the one I promise you will never hear.
Gray-marketing happens because certain people cannot
stand anyone getting between them and the product they
want. “Who is the gormless importer to tell me what I can
and can’t get!” (“Um, he is the person the actual producer
of said wine wants to have selling it exclusively,” I might
suggest, if I thought it’d be heard.)
There are only two reasons to indulge in gray-marketing.
A) ego, and B) profit-motive. Ego, because you
have to show at all costs that you have the cojones to get
the Product no matter whom you have to screw. And
profit-motive because nobody gray-markets anything
they’ll ever have to work to sell. Oh no! The wine’s
already sold itself; all this dog needs is to purvey it.
Do business with them if you like, or if you must.
Sometimes you need a swine to lead you to the truffles.
Just do NOT let them tell you they’re doing it for you,
because they care so passionately about great wine and
are working toward a Utopia where no one makes too
much money at it. If you believe that, I have a golf course
on Three Mile Island to sell you.
“Have I got a deal . . . just for you!”
I continually resist seeing my wines as Things or
products. That’s why I don’t care whether the same wine
is good every year. If wine A isn’t happnin’ this year,
wine B will be, and I’ll just take the better one. This can
perplex or annoy growers who are into “marketing,” but
that’s a dangerous tendency for a vintner in any case and
it can lead to ruffled feathers.
It boils down to an entirely practical consideration:
SELLING GERMAN WINES IS TOO MUCH TROUBLE
TO BE WORTH DOING EXCEPT FOR THE VERY
BEST. Otherwise, good grief! There’s easier ways to
bang your fool head against a wall.
I mean, my own palate is fallible enough without
being false to it. At least you know I went nuts over every
one of these wines. I have to be able to defend the choice,
every choice. That’s why I put my name in weensy letters
on the back label.
Other than this uncompromising pig-headedness, I
actually have a few principles I’d like to share with you.
1. I won’t offer you a wine I haven’t tasted, nor a
wine I don’t fully endorse. I make one exception to this
rule. If we oversell a wine and a producer offers the new
vintage as a substitute, I’ll sometimes accept the substitute
un-tasted if the grower’s track record makes the
wine a sure-thing.
2. I select my growers and their wines based on quality
alone. No other reason.
3. I am essentially apathetic with respect to growers’
associations. Many of them are sincere and they
sometimes mean well and do good, but just as often it’s
a way to strut, and life’s too short for that crap.
Growers associations can be helpful in prospecting,
but all I really care about is what’s in the glass, not on
the capsule.
4. I buy wines, not labels. Every place is
unknown until you know it. Who the hell heard of all
those little appellations in southern France until a few
years ago? I don’t go out of my way looking for the
obscure, but I won’t be deterred by obscurity, and I
hope you agree.
5. I don’t fuss at all over the amount of sweetness
which is or isn’t in my selections. The wines are balanced
or they’re not. These wines are!