Uncorked (12 page)

From his first videos in 2006, we were transfixed by the fast-talking Vaynerchuk, who described wines as tasting like Tootsie Rolls and “New York City garbage.” Oblivious to the cruddy lighting and bad camera angles, the chunky Jets fan (Vaynerchuk sometimes wears a team jersey during his reviews) thundered, describing one bottle as a “pile of stinky clothes [left] in a college dorm room infested by loose hamsters.” In the background, phones ring, but Vaynerchuk insists that his videos are shot in one take.

As refreshingly unself-conscious as he is wildly effusive, Vaynerchuk is a maniac, but one who tells the truth as he sees it.
In fact, he claims to have panned 70 percent of the wines sold in his store. I can’t say we always agree on his assessments, nor do I always understand his colorful descriptions. I don’t get his significance, but it is clear to everyone at the store that Vaynerchuk is an American original, even if he was born in Babruysk, Belarus.

Vaynerchuk has become a phenomenon, having appeared on
Ellen
and
The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien
. As Eric Asimov reported in the
New York Times
, “in the guise of educating the host’s palate to wine terms like sweaty, mineral, and earthy, he sniffed Mr. O’Brien’s armpit and persuaded him to chew an old sock, lick a rock, and eat dirt (topped with shredded cigar tobacco and cherries).” Articles have followed in the
Wall Street Journal, GQ
, and
Slate
, where Vaynerchuk was described as the “first wine guru of the YouTube era.”

Despite his tens of thousands of website viewers and Facebook friends and nearly a million Twitter followers, Gary claims that the webcasts did little to help Internet sales of wine, which rose only 3 percent. However, phone sales shot up 40 percent in the first year. Vaynerchuk wasn’t selling wine, he was selling himself. His strength wasn’t so much his Facebook savvy or his Twitter patter as his ability to use those tools to build trust and human relationships. Built up through new media, that trust then sold wine through one-hundred-year-old telephone lines.

At the time, we were oblivious to such subtleties. We equated “Internet” with “money machine.” Build a website, I assumed, and they will come. Hence we focused on slapping up a pretty website as soon and as inexpensively as we could. I bought an e-commerce software package from a Russian company and hired a chain-smoking Frenchman (a reclusive customer) to configure it. I will spare you, dear reader, the results of this misguided
United Nations’ experiment in digital design. Suffice it to say that it would have been a lot easier to pay a little more and actually have face-to-face meetings with our web developers. Yet after nine months, the website was complete. We even got a few online sales that first year.

We probably should have been blogging, but I was intimidated. As someone besieged by semiexperts in many media, I felt that a daily blog had to have something important to say every day. It had to be smart, and it had to be regular. To take on that platform, I needed more time. Partly, I have to admit, I was not keen on broadcasting my big nose and receding hairline. And given her volatile history, providing Janet with such a soapbox would have made me nervous. For the moment, we were content to watch and learn more about how the wine world really worked.

What we came to realize is that no tweet, Facebook post, e-mail push, or any other clever marketing trick can undo the damage of a cold drizzle. Conversely, a sunny day is every bees-to-honey cliché. For our wine sales, the weather is mightier than the Internet.

In aiming for the big fish, not only did we fail to identify this new generation of influencers and connoisseurs, we also neglected to realize that this high-stakes game of collectible wine sales meant lower margins on larger cash outlays. Unlike most of us, ultracollectors tend to look for very specific wines: the right producer from a particular vineyard in the most desirable vintage. Often finance types, they’re used to scanning screens and making decisions that are based on tiny numeric variations. An insular group with established relationships, they also seemed to create their own markets, bidding one supplier against another
for the best price. Something we could buy at $100, we would see selling for $110. If we waited ten years, we probably could move that bottle for $200. In the interim, it was a lot cheaper to make that same $10 by buying a $15 wine and selling it for $25.

How, I wondered, did the big guys make their money? The nation’s largest wine purveyor, I discovered, was Costco. In 2008, the cut-rate retailer sold seventy-five million bottles for a total of $1.1 billion in sales. Equally surprising is what it sells. Costco moves more Dom Pérignon (125,000 bottles in 2006) than any other store chain in the country. The bargain giant is also the nation’s biggest seller of classified-growth French wines, including prestigious names such as Chateau Margaux and Chateau Mouton Rothschild. Last time I looked, you could even pick up a twelve-bottle collection of Chateau d’Yquem, the vaunted French Sauternes, for $5,000.

Costco’s customers spend so much ($108 per purchase on average) because they make a lot. According to the company, the average income of its members is almost twice that of the average American household ($74,000 to $47,000) with close to a third pulling in over $100,000 per year. These well-to-do customers don’t think twice about plunking a $119 bottle of Dom (regular retail around $175) in the cart next to the two-gallon jugs of extra-virgin olive oil. Costco understands that everyone, including the affluent, loves a bargain.

These blue-chip brand names also set the stage for the inclusion of less known and less expensive selections. “People in the wine industry kind of look down their noses at selling wine at Costco, but we like being tucked between Dom Pérignon and Opus One,” says George Rose of Kendall-Jackson, the large California winery.

The real cash cow, however, has been Costco’s private blends. Markups on their Kirkland Signature wines are almost double what they get from more traditional brand names. In 2006, Costco sold 130,000 cases of its house label alcoholic beverages. If only we at Pasanella & Son could put together enough cash to buy containers of wine at a time and unravel the myriad federal, state, and local regulations regarding shipping, importing, labeling, and distribution.

We turned to another strategy. At industry events, we heard many colleagues brag about having bought wine “on the D.I.” D.I., or direct importing, means that the guy who brought the wine into the country was the person who distributed it. Bargains were supposed to abound because of the elimination of a middleman. What we found is that there were great deals—on one hundred cases. Otherwise, the importer/distributors seemed all too happy to keep a little extra profit for themselves.

Luckily, our tastings business was skyrocketing. Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse were booking private tastings in our enoteca. Since Janet was on the verge of a breakdown, the real challenge became getting her help. We thought she would lead the actual tastings. The negotiation, planning, sales, setup, and knockdown would be taken care of by a not-yet-hired miracle worker. That left the door open for almost anybody. Or almost no one.

We were flooded with interest. There was a doctor looking for some part-time work (that a medical professional had extra time should have tipped us off). There was a polite-sounding young man who later sent a thank-you using the e-mail address “moneypiggy.” There were actress/sommeliers who sent in head shots. There were slews of guys named Ralph with experience in “likka” stores.

One of our biggest forehead-slapping surprises was that people who work in the wine business like to drink. “Duh!” as even Luca knew to say by then. Two of our most experienced applicants, both of whom had managed multimillion-dollar stores, turned out to have serious problems. One was sued by a previous employer for having drunk—or stashed, or both—$150,000 of inventory. The other had been arrested for driving while intoxicated.

One of our first hires was John Lahart, a retired advertising executive and wine collector. He was interested in working a few evenings a week to learn about wine from “another perspective.” We were stunned that someone so accomplished and so qualified would want to sit behind a cash register! From the start, John was a hit with the customers. He was attentive but carefree in the way you are when you do something just for fun. Wine geeks esteemed his knowledge, which spanned California producers that had been famous in the 1970s to the latest cult wine from Bolgheri in Tuscany. Newbies appreciated that our easygoing “floorman” never tried to hustle them into buying expensive bottles. Everyone seemed to enjoy a few minutes of chatting with jolly John.

We still needed full-time help, particularly with our events.

In walked Suzanne, a recent San Diego State graduate with no wine experience. But Becky had a hunch that she would be perfect, and she was right. Suzanne was dedicated, smart, responsible, and endlessly patient. She had a sincere interest in wine (and has since received a master’s in wine marketing from Milan’s Bocconi School of Management, aka “Italy’s Wharton,” and now works as wine director of New York’s Alta restaurant). Best of all, under her sweet exterior, Suzanne is actually sweet.

During Suzanne’s tenure, our private events took off. From Dog the Bounty Hunter to Caroline Kennedy (who came to the same event hosted by their publisher), all sorts of notables waded through the fish guts and deserted streets to find us.

That September, we got a call to arrange a tasting for the British chef Nigella Lawson, who turned out to be as gracious as she is gorgeous. Two months later, we heard from one of her countrymen and fellow chefs: Jamie Oliver was looking for a place to have a dinner to celebrate the publication of his wife Jools’s book
Diary of an Honest Mum
.

Becky and I had met Jamie in 2000 when a friend had called with a tempting proposition: How would you like to have a soon-to-be famous chef make you and your friends dinner? The only catch was that the meal would have to be photographed for
Food & Wine
magazine. As the date approached, we got a call. “Would you mind,” a publicist asked, “if we could add a few of Jamie’s [read: more photogenic] pals?” “Sure, no problem,” I told her. The day before we received another query: “So sorry to bother you,” the publicist apologized, “but do you think we could move the dinner a little earlier, to, say, four-thirty?” “Oh, and don’t worry,” she added mysteriously, “the food will be real.”

Despite some missing friends, the late afternoon pasta party turned out to be one of the more memorable meals we ever had in our Meatpacking District loft. Initially, I was touched by how nervous Jamie was to cook for us “Italians.” By the end, Jamie was happily perched on our Vespa, which we stored in our loft, while munching away on pasta with cauliflower. The food was delicious, if not exactly piping hot—the photographer had instructed us not to chew while we were being shot.

We were feeling the pressure of being tasked with supplying the food and wine for Jools’s dinner. Thank goodness, we had some Italian friends with a nearby restaurant who were willing to take on the job. As they shuttled from the restaurant kitchen bearing steaming platters of gnocchi and homemade tordelli, we opened a selection of offbeat southern Italian wines. I still remember Jaime’s favorite, a Ciavolich Aries Pecorino from the Abruzzi region. A white wine with a pronounced herbal quality; we nicknamed it the “pot” wine. He called it “wicked!”

One of the most fun events we created took place in an abandoned train tunnel. Our installation for a design industry AIDS benefit featured a table surrounded by walls made of racks of drying spaghetti and a ceiling hung with 148 grape bunches. The last-minute addition of a male public relations intern who was persuaded to crush grapes with his feet in a barrel while dressed as Lucille Ball (kerchief, gingham blouse, pedal pushers) made it a hit. We were on a roll.