Above: I took this photo in a major franchise wine shop in Austin shortly after I moved to Texas about 8 years ago. At the time, Italian wine in the state was an afterthought for many retailers. Today, interest in the category is booming.
Ubi major, minor cessat…
Before sharing my own advice to Italian winemakers on reaching the American market, I’d like to point your attention to a compelling post by Alfonso Cevola from a few years ago, “How to bring your Italian wine to the American market.”
Alfonso’s more than thirty years in the trade and his unrivaled passion for Italian wines give him unique perspective into how the often convoluted system of Italian wine imports works in the U.S.
“How should I go about getting my wine to market in the U.S.?” is a question that Alfonso hears a lot. And I get it, too.
Yesterday, the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce Texas asked me to address a group of roughly 150 Italian food and wine producers who have gathered in Houston this week for the chamber’s Taste of Italy event (last-minute registration is welcome, btw; the tasting runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today at the Hilton Post Oak).
I’ve just started working with the chamber as a blogger and media consultant and I was thrilled and flattered that they asked me to talk to the attendees.
In my presentation, I talked about the renaissance of Italian enogastronomy in North America and Houston’s role as a newly emerged epicenter for food and wine culture in the U.S. (see Tom Sietsema’s Washington Post profile of Houston as a leading food destination from late last year).
I also spoke of my impressions that the Italian winemakers most successful in the U.S. are the ones that spend ample time and make significant investment in the market, pressing the flesh and creating networks of relationships with wine professionals here.
After my talk, which took place in a conference room at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (see below), I was approached by a number of winemakers who asked my advice on how to get their products here.
And I kept coming back to a wine that I tasted and blogged about last week, an unfiltered Roero Arneis.
The wine, by legacy Roero grower Negro, was created especially for the American market at the request of the winery’s U.S. importer. And as far as I know, it’s not even available in Italy (at least not according to Negro’s website).
I had been introduced by the wine at a wine bar in Austin, where it is one of the venue’s best-selling by-the-glass offerings.
It’s such a great example of an importer recognizing a niche in youthful American wine culture and exploiting it: young and hip U.S. wine professionals love the “crunchy and groovy,” as I like to call it, and they are looking for perceived (and I underline, perceived) authenticity.
To many Italian wine professionals, this cloudy expression of Arneis would seem at best a barrel sample and at worst a defective wine.
But to the crew at a hipster wine bar in one of America’s coolest cities, the wine is not only a conversation piece, it’s a bona fide moneymaker.
And that’s the ticket: the importer recognized a niche and conceived a wine that could be applied in a narrow but lucrative category of wine sales.
You can’t just make the best Arneis in the world, I kept telling the sales agents and winemakers who approached me.
You need to make an Arneis that has an application in the U.S. market. And you can only identify such a niche and such an application by visiting the market and interacting with wine, food, and restaurant professionals and understanding what they are looking for.
It’s kind of like the pas dosé phenomenon in the U.S.
Despite the growing interest in wine education in our country, few wine professionals have a genuinely solid grasp of how classic-method wines are made. I’ve learned this over the last year touring the country pouring Franciacorta for the Franciacorta consortium.
But when you ask wine pros which classic-method wines are their favorites, they invariably point to the wines that they perceive to be the driest because they are the “purest” expressions of the appellation in their minds.
I could go on and on… But those are my two cents for what they are worth.
In other news…
After my talk, I really enjoyed walking around the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo grounds.
I couldn’t help but think about my dream of growing up to be a cowboy when I was Georgia P’s age (4).
The ranchers were so friendly and had lots to say about semen. That’s their niche, after all (no joke).