Careers in Wine

9 Core Behaviors Of People Who Positively Impact The…

It’s critical to note that people who’ve made a real difference aren’t all privileged, advantaged or “special” by any stretch.

Many come from disadvantaged families, crushing circumstances and initially limited capabilities, but have found ways to pick themselves up and rise above their circumstances (and their genes) to transform their own lives and those around them.

Researching these makers, shakers and disruptors, and working with our own clients who shape the world around them in powerful and constructive ways, We have observed 9 core behaviors that set them apart – habitual ways of behaving and approaching life and work that distinguish them from those who long to make a difference but can’t or won’t find the way.

image of hands cupping a small glass globe

 

The 9 core behaviors of people who positively impact the world are:

  • They dedicate themselves to what gives their life meaning and purpose.
  • They commit to continually bettering themselves.
  • They engage with people in open, mutually-beneficial ways
  • They invest time and energy not in what is, but what can be.
  • They embrace critique.
  •  They spread what they know.
  • They uplift others as they ascend.
  • They view the journey as the goal.
  • They use their power and influence well.

Now go out and impact the world!

Careers in Wine

Instead Of Looking For Your Purpose Or ‘One Thing’,…

When talking about their careers, there are two stories I often hear women telling themselves:

  • “Unless I figure out the one thing I’ve always wanted to do, I’m going to be miserable.”
  • “I’ve invested so much time striving to be successful in this industry, if I transition to something else it’ll have all been for nothing.”

Women (and men) often feel an urgency to find their ‘one thing.’ Or, they stay in the same industry longer than they’d like because they feel obligated or stuck. To discuss finding purpose and getting unstuck I talked with Nicole Antoinette, the host of the Real Talk Radio podcast. Antoinette is a self-described “recovering self help addict” and a queen of reinvention.

nicole-antoinette making a goofy face

Nicole Antoinette Photo Credit: Foxes + Wolves

With a resume that includes highlights such as camp director, owner of a web design firm, goal setting coach, and cookie shop owner, Antoinette says the theme of her career has been change.

This is a dramatic juxtaposition to her husband, an engineer at Twitter whose path has been pretty linear. She says, “He’s taken the more traditional or ‘recommended’ path that was put on a pedestal when I was younger: pick your thing and become really good at your thing.”

Around the time she turned 30, Antoinette struggled with shame and guilt that she hadn’t found her ‘one thing’ like her partner. Without her ‘one thing’ all the choices she had made in her 20s felt like a waste. She asked herself, “What’s wrong with me that I’ve had all of these seemingly unrelated careers?”

Paths Aren’t Always Linear, But Skills Are Transferable

Antoinette felt badly about this pattern of behavior until she had a realization. “The model of pick one thing, get better and better at that thing, and always be continually interested in that thing is actually pretty rare.” Stories of achieving greatness through perseverance in the same profession (picture Michael Phelps) are the ones celebrated in the media, she argues, which causes us to falsely believe that kind of career consistency is the norm.

In addition to craving an idealized ’one thing’, people are reluctant to lose all the opportunities they’ve created for themselves in their industry. Antoinette, who’s had at least 4 careers already, says if you go to do something else, all the experience, skills, and relationships you’ve developed come with you. “ It’s not like you leave a job or an industry and someone comes and ‘Men in Blacks’ your brain ,” she explains referencing the memory erasing technology from the popular film series.

For example, the same organization and communication skills that made her a good camp director were a tremendous asset when she ran her own business. As I started my consulting practice, a woman I’d met in my last role, managing a political campaign, became my first client.

Ask Yourself Good Questions

When it comes to her own transitions, Antoinette says the best advice she’s ever gotten is to ask yourself good questions, such as:

Referencing her own experience, Antoinette says, “If you’re actually willing to go back and ask yourself again and again, eventually you just get sick of yourself,” and get to the answer.

Asking herself those questions relentlessly, she realized she didn’t care about having a big flashy career. She says it took all of her 20s to accept that a “capital C Career” wasn’t important to her. She challenged the idea that there was a finite destination to reach, and she’s not looking back. Or as she says,“F*ck, I’m so much happier now.”

Whether you’re just starting out in your career or decades in, consider giving yourself permission to explore what kind of work is fulfilling rather than searching frantically for your ‘one thing’. Who knows, maybe cookie shop owner is in your future.

Lelia Gowland helps women negotiate and navigate their careers. Learn more about her e-courses on negotiating a raise, a promotion, and a new position at gowlandllc.com.

Careers in Wine

5 Signs You’re a “Unicorn” Employee

Unicorns are hard to catch. Back in the 1500s, it was believed that only fair young maidens could gain the trust of these elusive, horned creatures.

I’m no fair maiden. Still, in my time, I’ve had the luck of getting close to many magical unicorns … in the form of “unicorn” employees. Not to be confused with unicorn companies—startups valued at $1 billion or more—“unicorn” employees, for me, are staff who possess a unique set of qualities that make them extremely rare and valuable. Like actual unicorns, they’re hard to find, but once hired, offer up enormous benefits in the workplace. To name a few, they shatter expectations, raise the bar for everyone and are simply a joy to be around. Unicorn employees can literally take your business to the next level.

Whether you’re looking to build a unicorn army, or hoping to boost your own value in the workplace, here are the five key qualities of unicorn employees:

You aren’t limited by your job title. 

In the span of about 5 years, my company, Hootsuite, went from a 100-person tech startup to a 1000-person global company. Through this stage of “hyper growth,” employees who truly flourished were flexible and intellectually curious.

Earlier on in the business, this meant having the ability to wear many hats and excel at varied tasks, critical at a fast-growing startup. For example, just because somebody’s job title was “Office Administrator,” didn’t mean she would shy away from pitching in on a major marketing campaign by helping brainstorm some catchy tweets.

Later, as the company grew, unicorn employees jumped at the chance to dive deeper into specific, growing areas of business, which needed good people. Some even decided to move across several departments. I saw unicorn employees make surprising leaps—one even went from financial specialist to software engineer. I think this is so important to employee growth that we recently launched a new pilot initiative, called the “stretch program,” to help people expand their knowledge and expertise across the business … and grow their unicorn horns.

You think big and small. 

Exceptional employees are able to think strategically. This means having the ability to take a step back and see the overall company goals, or the industry as a whole, then apply it to your work. To be effective in business, you must be able to see the big picture.

On the flipside, while big-picture thinking is critical, I’ve also found that the best employees also know the devil is in the details. Running a business requires meticulous attention. A minor copyright issue, improperly executed email campaign, or even what seems like a small technical glitch can end up being catastrophic, affecting a lot of clients in a short period of time. The best employees are those who take the time to read the fine print. These are the types of people I know I can entrust with serious responsibility.

You have true grit. 

The concept of “grit” has made its way into popular culture recently, perhaps sparked by psychologist Angela Duckworth’s popular TED talk and book, on the subject. She defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” and says it’s a crucial factor to achieving success.

I couldn’t agree more. Being an entrepreneur since I was a teenager, I’ve learned that the business world is like being on a boat in the open sea. Whether it’s a patch of rough waves or an unexpected storm, unexpected obstacles are inevitable. During these turbulent times, having grit—a dogged persistence—can help you keep focused on the destination. In fact, that very outlook helped my billion-dollar company weather the storm and get to the next level. Unicorn employees have true grit, and are able stay calm and focused on the task at hand, even on choppy seas.

You’re respectful by nature.

The ability to work well with others is a skill that benefits any workplace. It seems simple enough, but you’d be surprised.

A few years ago, I put out a job posting for a high-level sales role. Many people applied, and after a series of interviews, I had some top candidates in mind. However, when I checked in with my executive assistant at the time, I was shocked to find out how many of those people who had been personable and courteous to me, had been downright rude to her.

Unicorn employees are respectful by nature, and would never treat someone—regardless of title —in this way. It’s something that absolutely sets a stellar employee apart from an average one. In fact, this is so important to the well-being of our staff, it’s been built into two of our four core company values: “Respect the individual,” and “lead with humility.”

You get it done. 

A few years back, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner sent out a short status update on his platform: “In simplest terms possible, the people I most enjoy working with dream big, get it done, and know how to have fun.”

The update blew up, striking a chord with the tens of thousands of people who commented and liked it. (Weiner followed up by writing a full post on the topic.) Like him, I too am a huge proponent of having fun at work and believe it’s crucial to success. However, I can’t stress how important it is for people on the job to be able to get shit done. After all, no matter how great a co-worker is to be around, if he can’t produce actual results, his presence is isn’t ultimately helpful and may even be damaging to others. Great teams can be shattered by a single member who can’t get shit done.

Meanwhile, studies have shown that top performers contribute to a business 10 times more than their average counterparts. In fact, some firms, including Microsoft, claim that figure to be 100 times.

The bottom line: At the end of the day, you can be respectful, multi-talented, tenacious, detail-oriented and a big thinker. But if you don’t produce real results and move the needle, all those traits are wasted. You must be able to execute. It’s an essential unicorn quality.

For companies and business leaders, it’s probably worthwhile to put some extra time and effort into chasing unicorns. Unlike their mythical counterparts, they’re very real and they can change your company. And for unicorn employees in the making, it’s never too late to grow your strengths and make yourself more rare and valuable than ever.

CEO @ HootSuite

Image: Evonne Heyning

Research

The New U.S. Wine Market

The U.S. wine market fell off a cliff in September 2008, and it is still hanging in mid-air.

Far more has changed in this market than the behavior of the American consumer: The companies that distribute and sell the vast majority of wines have dramatically changed the way they do business.

To begin to understand this new market, Stonebridge Research created its Fine Wine Trade Monitor in March 2010, with support from industry groups including Napa Valley Vintners, the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance and South African Winegrowers, and with help from industry leaders across the country.

From March to June 2010, we conducted telephone conversations of one hour or more with more than 50 top managers in the wine trade: eight distributors, 17 independent wine retailers and 25 full-service restaurants (both chains and independents, including national accounts) in the top wine markets in the United States (New York, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Las Vegas/Reno, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco) and several smaller markets.

In each conversation, we asked:

  •  How has your wine market been, over the last 24 months?
  •  How have you adapted your business?
  •  What is selling and what isn’t?
  •  What moves wine in this marketand what doesn’t?
  •  What notable trends have you seen in consumer behavior?
  •  What has been the impact of changes in distributor business?
  •  What can – and should – producers do?
  •  What worries you about the future?In the process, we learned what exactly this new market was and how the trade – wholesale, retail, restaurant – has changed to adapt to the new economy.

BEYOND GROCERY STORE DATA

We know that Americans are still drinking wine. They are just paying less for it. Consumers have changed what they buy, what they are willing to pay for it, and particu- larly, where they buy it – with consequences for everyone in the wine business.

You may have read that not only are retail wine sales rising, so are wine prices at retail. But that is InfoScan data, which is primarily grocery and drug store data, in the states where wine can be sold in those channels. In late 2008 and early 2009, grocery stores closed out – at huge discounts – most of the higher-priced, small-production wines on their shelves. Pretty much everything else has been heavily discounted.

So what does it mean if those prices appear to be increasing? Either that discounts may be some- what smaller or that consumers are taking advantage of better wines being discounted.

So, wine prices are rising…from what?

Are wine prices recovering?

What is really going on out there?

RETAIL

Here are some basics on wine sales. In the “normal” market, before the recession, it would take about three months to move an inventory of wine at retail (described in the trade as a “turn rate” of four times a year). Some lesser-known or more expensive wines might take longer to move. Thus, much of the cost of wine in all parts of the market is the cost of holding inventory. That inventory turn rate for wine has now slipped to once a year: 12 months to move all but the strongest brands and biggest values. This happened at a time when credit was becoming scarce and more expensive.

From the third quarter of 2008 through the spring of 2010, retail wine sales revenue declined 15%- 20% in most parts of the country, while sales volume – the number of bottles sold – rose. Many retailers found they were “working twice as hard for less money.” Wine would only sell with large discounts – 30% being the norm – or a special event. Many retailers cut staff by as much as 20%. “Hand-selling” of wine was an expense few could continue to afford.

Retailers also responded by cutting inventory, by 20% or more. They swapped out wines costing more than $50 for wines under $20. Anything that didn’t move quickly was closed out. Imports were the first to go, then smaller producers, library wines, multiple vineyard-designates, all those “new varietals” – all gone. And if they haven’t seen you lately, you are probably one of the brands they cut.

If it looks like retail shelves became filled with large-volume brands, they were. Risk-averse consumers were reaching for not only less expensive wines, but familiar labels from large producers able to fund the promotional allowances and discounts needed to sell wine.

The only alternative to discounting that seems to work has been special events with winemakers. Vintners’ travel is up 30% or more.

We do a lot of consumer research at Stonebridge. A few years ago, price was a factor in wine purchases – one of several, along with brand, variety, ratings, the occasion when the wine would be served, etc. Wine was, to use a wonderful phrase from Yankelovich Partners’ study for the California Wine Institute in 2005, a “safe adventure” – consumers were excited about trying something new, even dangerous, in wine. Well, that’s over.

Today no one is quite sure what consumers want, other than price. At least at retail, they are not being adventurous. Not that they are being given much of an option, either, because there is less and less adventurous wine on the shelf.

RESTAURANTS

Restaurants have been much more creative in responding to this economy.

The year 2009 was the worst for U.S. restaurants in almost 40 years. Full-service restaurants were the hardest hit, with particular pain coming from the loss of corporate and expense-account business. The average check was down 15%- 20%, but the average wine sale was down 20%-50%. Wine sales were down far more than spirits or beer, which were seen as more economical alcoholic beverages.

Restaurants responded by adapting their menus to allow customers to “manage their spend” through increased choices in more price categories and flexible portion size, prix fixe meals, special offers, food sharing and small plates. And they have adapted their wine lists accordingly.

Customers have been turning toward wine by the glass for several years, but in 2009, the shift was drastic, from bottle purchases to a cocktail, followed by a glass of wine with dinner. Restaurateurs described their new business as “selling more wine to fewer people at lower prices.”

The “sweet spot” for wine bottle sales dropped to the $40-$60 range from $90 or more – and it hasn’t improved. We even began seeing “house wine” again, albeit of better quality than in years past. With wine sales slowing, restaurants began cutting new purchases, cutting lists and selling from inventory. They put the expensive wines on special and when they sold out, they were replenished with wines they could sell for $40 or less.

Inventory levels were cut, long- term, to reduce costs. Individual orders got smaller – cases became six-packs and six-packs became two bottles – to limit inventory exposure.

Restaurants have long expected to be able to re-order regularly, monthly or bimonthly, for their more active wines, which became more important as individual orders dropped in size.

With the wines they do offer, restaurants have taken a different road than retailers. They are looking for “esoteric” imports, new wines, small producers, wines not available at retail. The last thing customers need to see on a restaurant list is a wine they could have bought in the grocery store or (horror of hor- rors!) at Costco at a fraction of the price.

Thanks to creative wine lists and support from energized sommeliers and trained servers, consumers have regained some of their cour- age to experiment with wine, seeking new, affordable alternatives to the more expensive wines they used to order in restaurants. Thus, wine sales on premise have been shifting toward small-production imports: particularly Veneto whites and Rhône reds. Restaurant traffic was revived in much of the country in 2010. Corporate and private dining business is coming back — yet wine lists have not returned to their glory days.

With restaurants and retailers heading in different directions, how do you build a brand today?

DISTRIBUTION

Now we get to the distributors.

Think about it: The whole structure of the three-tier system depends on distributors holding inventory. Inventory costs have multiplied as turn rates collapsed. Restaurants cut their purchases by as much as 50% and many closed. Retailers cut orders. Inventory credit costs rose and conditions tightened.

Starting in late 2008, most dis- tributors started trimming everything that had not moved in 30-60 days. During the past 18 months, there were hundreds of closeouts, if not more, flooding the market at discounts to retailers and res- taurants of up to 80%. Accounts often could not find out where to buy many of their usual wines.

Distributors have since cut 20%-30% of brands from inventory, primarily slower-moving small producers, library wines, new brands and imports.

One sales director described distributors as “triaging” customers, with major national brands at the top and smaller brands on the third level, described as the “if you are lucky, we might return your phone call” customer group.

Distributors have targeted inventory for no more than 30-60 days, even if it means out-of-stocks. They are not holding inventory for mid- season re-orders. Allocations go out once or not at all.

In the long run, long after the consumer starts shopping again, it is these changes in distribution that will have the greatest impact on the U.S. wine market.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO PRODUCERS?

First, few, if any, producers will be able to depend on wholesalers to simply take their production off their hands and find a market for it. This situation has been coming for several years, and producers have largely been in denial.

The most immediate impact is on producer cash flow.

Distributors are decreasing what they are willing to buy, and completely eliminating some brands. In September 2009, wineries began dumping inventory to distributors with discounts as high as 60%, after spending much of the year insisting they could not even moderately adjust the pricing they had built up during the boom years.

The idea was presumably to clear out inventory to enable a healthier market with the new vin- tage, yet the discounts continue.

The expectation that pricing would return to old levels is unlikely to be met. Trade and consumers who purchased wines earlier in the year, at higher prices, felt betrayed, and those brands are likely damaged for the long term with these customers.

Next is the realization that producers are indeed responsible for generating their own demand.

Vintners need to nurture their relationships with their accounts, understand what they can sell and be out in the market to provide the training and support sales.

Independent sales and marketing companies are proliferating, assisting producers who can’t afford a sales force, yet this also adds another layer of costs.

Wine companies are learning they need to manage their distributors, monitor their inventories to avoid out-of-stocks, keep an eye on pricing to avoid closeouts, keep tabs on warehouse situations and check on deliveries.

They must work harder to make sure they get paid, and to ensure their wines are valuable to their distributors.

Finally, it comes down to more rigorously managing the business of wine: building sales planning and inventory management capabilities, and understanding and controlling costs.

Most important is to protect and improve quality while tightening business practices.

There is already concern that wine quality may be compromised as vintners try to protect margins, a counter- productive strategy when consumers are discovering that good wine can be found at every price level.

Cost savings will have to come from improved business, financial and operations management, with retaining and improving wine quality a top priority. Or, in the words of one former large-company executive, “taking money out of process to put into quality.”

What other options are there for producers?

Consumer-direct sales have revived in some regions, making up for some of the lost trade markets. But as ShipCompliant data has shown, consumer-direct is still a small segment of wine sales. Most wine will continue to be sold through retailers and eating-and- drinking establiishments.

Attention is gradually focusing on the opportunities for direct-to- trade sales, through so-called clearing distributors. There is anecdotal evidence of distributors setting up clearing divisions to process three- tier paperwork for a fee, leaving actual sales and physical distribution to wine producers. Many of the new sales and marketing companies and brokers, started by distribution veterans, are developing comparable services.

Restaurateurs report that distributors are proposing to take orders for smaller wines they do not usually stock, if the trade commits to pay in advance and to take immediate delivery, so that no inventory costs are incurred.

I had a conversation several months ago with a friend in the industry who remarked, with a startled expression, that he had just realized that he usually said “supply and demand” and I say “demand and supply.” Perhaps, he suggested, that says something about the industry and the market today.

Sadly, selling wine has always been more difficult than making it. Today, it is definitely what a vintner needs to think about first.

Barbara Insel is president and CEO of Napa-based Stonebridge Research Group LLC, a leading strategic advisory and research firm servicing the wine industry. Insel has led major projects for the French Trade Ministry, Wine Institute, California Association of Winegrape Growers, Napa Val- ley Vintners and many others. To learn more about Stonebridge Fine Wine Trade Monitor, visit www.stonebridgeresearch.com or contact Insel at binsel@stonebridgeresearch.com. 

Luxury Wine

Drunk with Power

Drunk with PowerStanding in the low-ceilinged basement of a rundown Seattle bungalow, among the shiny steel vats and plastic tubing that constitute Animale winery, the wine merchant Jon Rimmerman swirled his glass, sniffed its bouquet, took a sip and moved his mouth around as if chewing. A fair-skinned, dapper and somewhat elfin man, Rimmerman wore Kelly green jeans, a lavender sweater and a black-and-white plaid sportcoat. Salt-and-pepper curls bushed out from under his Greek fisherman’s cap as he bent over a white plastic bucket. Spitting out a great purple jet of wine, Rimmerman signaled to the winemaker Matt Gubitosa that he could taste exactly one more vintage before leaving.

From the outside, Animale — named for Gubitosa’s dead but still-beloved cat, whose image has appeared on many Animale bottles — looked more like a methamphetamine lab than a winery, with an overgrown lawn, a faded gnome statue and reflective insulation covering all the basement windows. On the inside, Animale was clean and well lighted, with all proper licensing, classic R. & B. on the radio — “a little bit louder now!” — and a sleepy kitten.

“That’s the Dolcetto?” Rimmerman asked, as Gubitosa poured.

“Two thousand ten, yes. You need some pizza with that. I use cultivated yeast, but no mechanical anything.”

Rimmerman is the founder and sole owner of Garagiste, the world’s largest e-mail-based wine business. With 136,000 subscribers, Rimmerman says that Garagiste does, on average, $30 million in annual sales offered exclusively through his long, florid, self-mythologizing daily e-mails. “Dear Friends, somewhere along the path to wine-related enlightenment” began a recent one, which later evoked “the incredulous 1970s chemical salesman, dumping buckets of toxic pesticides” onto the vineyards of poor Chambertin, Margaux, Latour. “At some point, the land gives up. It must be resuscitated over decades to fully escape the poison (similar to smoking — the body eventually cleans itself and regenerates, but a certain scarring remains).” He then conjured lovely Sardinia, Europe’s “truest untouched terra firma,” source of the obscure 2011 Rigaterri Mirau — “Djarum cigarette in your glass . . . massive pine forest, clove, resin,” a “once-in-a-blue-moon” steal at $18.61 a bottle.

Despite Animale’s admirable smallness, Rimmerman was skeptical going in: only months earlier, Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate gave Gubitosa’s 2009 Petit Verdot a stellar 92-point rating; Rimmerman has built his reputation by differentiating his tastes from those of other critics, favoring the austere, eccentric and putatively authentic over what you might call the merely delicious. But now Rimmerman spit out another purple mouthful and said, with evident surprise, “That’s the most unusual wine.” He looked Gubitosa in the eye. “I mean, not to say whether it’s good or bad, like or don’t like.”

Gubitosa, a burly, thin-haired 50-something who works for the United States Environmental Protection Agency when he’s not cranking tunes, petting kittens and making fine wine, nodded. Point taken.

“But it has a personality.”

“Yeah, it’s not for everybody,” Gubitosa conceded.

“The pepper, it’s incredibly crushed on the nose and through the palate, with those hard tannins,” Rimmerman said. “There’s nothing fun about that.” This was a backhanded compliment. Wines of integrity — wines of “character and terroir,” to use Rimmerman’s term — aim not to please but to express what Rimmerman calls, in all seriousness, “vinous truth,” meaning the honest expression of a particular grape varietal, grown in a particular place, in a particular year. “People have distilled my life down to, He’s in pursuit of the truth, more broadly, in all things,” Rimmerman says.

Rimmerman shook Gubitosa’s hand, explaining that he had a flight booked for later that evening, over to the wine country of southeastern Washington, for a few more days of tasting. From there, Rimmerman had a flight booked to Washington, D.C., where his first East Coast warehouse is under construction. Rimmerman says he has spent about half of the last 15 years on the road, hunting wine and story in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Turkey, Israel, three Canadian provinces, northern Mexico and 13 American states.

The vineyards of the Savoie, in the French Alps.

Photograph by Shira Young

Stepping into the Seattle downpour, Rimmerman trotted delicately across the sad lawn, climbed into the car and insisted that his personal preference — the question of whether or not he would drink Gubitosa’s wines in his own home — was irrelevant.

“What I’m trying to uncover is something that is culturally important or of the moment, which this definitely is,” Rimmerman said. “This is cutting-edge Washington State winemaking. So, first: Are the wines sound? And then, would people that read everything that I write, every day” — in those Garagiste e-mail offers — “be interested not just for the wine but for the story, the cats, the meth lab, the geologist, the maybe-no-woman-in-his-life. Would they like to kind of taste that story in the bottle.” The answer was maybe: Gubitosa’s wines were not “immediately crowd pleasing, but he was trying to make something real, that was not doctored.” In Rimmerman’s cosmology of the wine industry, which holds that a vast majority of wine on the U.S. market goes through industrial processing aimed at pleasing Robert Parker, this was high praise indeed.

Driving through Seattle’s streets, he rattled off various nicknames he claimed to have been given by unnamed others: “The Wine Whisperer. The Pied Piper of Wine. The Great and Powerful Vinous Oz. The (Real) Emperor of Wine. The Emperor Who Has Clothes. I’ll get you a list.”

“The Wine Whisperer” refers to Rimmerman’s conviction that he, along with his partner and their 6-year-old daughter, all have superhuman tasting powers that may or may not qualify them as what are called “supertasters,” a distinction thought to have a legitimate anatomical basis. In addition, Rimmerman will say that his daughter has a genetically enhanced tactile sense — that she is a kind of superfeeler — and that he, personally, by simply looking at a label, can recall the taste of any wine that has ever crossed his lips, a number running into the many tens of thousands. This is an aptitude that, he feels quite sure, even Parker cannot claim. “This is something that people have called a photographic memory of wine,” Rimmerman told me. “Or they’re not quite sure what it is. It hasn’t been categorized yet.”

Those two “Emperor” nicknames, playing off the Robert Parker biography “The Emperor of Wine,” evoke the doubtless pleasant fantasy that Rimmerman — despite being a salesman with no medium beyond his own marketing copy — might somehow displace Parker as the great American wine tastemaker. “I don’t think of myself as a retailer or an importer,” Rimmerman likes to say. “I think of myself as a writer and a conduit of culture.”

As we parked near Seattle’s deepwater cargo port, Rimmerman said he has also been called the J. Peterman of Wine, “being able to tell vivid stories in a catalog where people buy trunks from India they have no use for.” He tried to put all this together for me: “There is an aspect of J. Peterman. There is an aspect of Oz. There is an aspect of the Pied Piper leading people over the edge where they’ve never tasted before. But no one really knows who I am and how I do this. When other people try to copy what we do, I’m very floored by that. It’s wonderful, the admiration.”

Stepping into the rain, just then, he opened an unmarked door in a concrete wall and led me into his cavernous warehouse filled to the ceiling with countless cases of wine. His partner, Shira Young, stood nearby, a striking woman with jet-black hair, dark eyes, golden skin and a soothing and sensible demeanor that reflects well on the manic Rimmerman. She and one of their daughters, Gigi, hovered near a tall round table covered with olive oil both in bottles and on plates.

Rimmerman asked Gigi if she had tasted them.

Shira replied for her. “She tasted the entire table.”

Gigi did not look up; she was busy drawing her little hands through a plate of olive oil and then dreamily rubbing her fingers together.

Rimmerman with his partner, Shira, and their daughters, Gigi, 6, and Pip, 3, in the South of France.

Photograph by Shira Young

Garagiste, which gets its name from a French winemaking movement, has not advertised since its creation in 1996. Rimmerman built a Web site only two years ago. Before that, you had to hear about his list through a friend, copy the e-mail address, then send in a polite request to join — analogous, in some ways, to the nightclub without a name, creating desire precisely by its disinterest in attracting you. Even today, the Garagiste Web site — through which you can now sign up for the e-mail list — has no e-commerce function nor even a blog post of Rimmerman’s daily offers. You get the memo or you don’t, and Rimmerman rarely offers the same wine twice. Though he blackballs people who might buy in volume to resell — the words “no sales to retailers or wholesalers” appear in every e-mail offer — he claims that competitors skulk around the list nonetheless, under fake names, even sending him anonymous death threats demanding an end to his dangerously low prices on both inexpensive wines (he sells plenty for under $10 a bottle) and pricey ones, like his recent offer of 2009 Romanée Conti at $25,821 per 12-bottle case. (“Please limit requests to 1×12-pack per person,” said the accompanying order information, as if that were necessary.)

Rimmerman makes ordering easy enough, and also remarkably human: every offer says something like, “reply to this e-mail or send Nicki a note,” referring to his longtime assistant. But he also requires a tolerance for deferred gratification, shipping only twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, when Rimmerman says extreme heat or cold are less likely to destroy the wine in transit. In his wine offerings, he told me in a personal e-mail, he strives to reach his entire demographic simultaneously, “from Brooklyn ‘coolio’ (Williamsburg, Red Hook) to waning coolio (Park Slope) to Upper West Side to Scarsdale,” as he puts it, “with vastly different levels of disposable income.” Thus, obscure cheap wines for “the lowest-disposable-income group with the most cutting-edge knowledge of the wine world and the most time to spend on their computer (23-to-33-year-olds in Brooklyn, the Mission, Echo Park in L.A., etc.)” are offered in the same e-mail as wildly expensive ones, the whole thing stitched together by, say, “Beach Boys songs and bizarre, little-known facts or idiosyncrasies of Brian Wilson.”

Rimmerman was born in 1966 and raised on Chicago’s North Shore until his parents divorced and Rimmerman’s mother and stepfather took him to live in rural Wisconsin. He remained close to a father he describes, with characteristic brio, as a kind of supersalesman — claiming he invented commodities-trading algorithms “before computers,” created “one of the first pro-athlete management agencies” only to sell it before it became profitable, and helped the N.F.L. develop the whole idea of staging exhibition games overseas.

“He made millions and he lost millions and he was never afraid to go for it,” Rimmerman told me. “That’s definitely my personality and the impetus for Garagiste — no fear, believing in yourself.”

Garagiste itself emerged from an ad hoc wine-tasting club at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After finals one year, Rimmerman and a few classmates celebrated by pooling money to buy a 1979 Krug Champagne and 1982 Dom Pérignon. “It was one of those ‘Oh, my God’ moments, there’s something of a higher order here,” he said. “I sat with those wines for 15 hours.”

It soon emerged among the group that Rimmerman had the most sensitive palate and a gift for spinning great stories about interesting wines, and it wasn’t long, he says, before he found himself faxing an informal wine letter to friends scattered around the country.

Three tips from Jon Rimmerman
for buying wine at your local shop.


AVOID THE MIDDLE

The eye-level rack at your market is usually dominated by shelf space “owned” by local distributors. Some of the top, smaller production examples are represented by tiny distributors that cannot pay slotting or marketing fees demanded by grocers for eye-level rack space. Beat them at their own game — look at top and bottom shelves or in poor visibility areas of a display — my gut tells me you will find a number of gems lying in wait.

 

ALCOHOL CAN FOOL YOU

High alcohol does not equal high interest. Alcohol can obfuscate the true nature and nuance of a wine — even with normally high-alcohol examples like Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Alcohol levels have risen to blackout levels over the last 10 to 15 years, spurred by a variety of sparks: a certain critic’s preference and possibly global warming. Don’t give in to the rise! Challenge yourself to look for reds under 14 percent and whites under 13 percent. My sweet spot is 12½ to 13½ percent for reds, 11½ to 12½ percent for dry whites.

 

TRUST OTHER DRINKERS

Use your smartphone to create a level playing field: community-based Web sites like Eric Levine’s CellarTracker (cellartracker.com) give you the opinions of your peers, those who have actually tasted the wine in question — not the opinion of a distributor or a magazine. You can easily pull them up while standing in front of a wall of a dozen unknown New Zealand sauvignon blancs, and all will start to make sense in a jiffy.

During Rimmerman’s years at DePaul University law school, he landed a summer job in Chicago, at the first American Starbucks outside Seattle. While jerking espresso and sweeping the floors there, he happened to meet the company’s founder, Howard Schultz.

“So I was part of the whole genesis of, whoa, what Starbucks was,” Rimmerman says. “I’ll never forget the incredible passion he had for a very simple idea that he was absolutely 100 percent certain would be important to the culture of the United States in the next 20 years.” Rimmerman says he learned from his time at Starbucks “the beauty of retail marketing, of conceptual ideology with consumer goods,” an idea that can be roughly translated as defining a crystal-clear brand identity and then ensuring that everything from the product to customer relations reinforces it.

Rimmerman was living in Seattle when his own simple idea fell into place. “That was right around the same time as the whole Seattle, Nirvana, Internet, you know, boom, of incredible creative energy,” he says, aligning his own origin story with those. “I met all these incredible, smart people inventing all these things called, like, Adobe. I mean, Bezos was running Amazon out of a garage. And everybody knew them!”

He realized he had the seeds of his own start-up in that wine letter. He’d already switched to e-mail, picking up several hundred new subscribers who often asked where to buy the wines. It was a no-brainer to start selling them. All he needed now, Rimmerman decided, was a clear sense of mission — a brand identity, in other words, centered on making the world a better place instead of just making a buck. Rimmerman claims that he made two lists — things he liked about the wine business, and things he did not — and decided that his company’s goal would be to transform the industry until his “don’t like” column was empty.

He’s a little vague about what was actually on those lists — you suspect that he has, to be generous, lost the originals. But he is consistent in characterizing his primary don’t-like: an intolerable gulf between winemakers and wine drinkers caused by a legally mandated separation of importers, distributors and retailers. “It’s one of the only systems in our country — women’s right to vote, all these things that have changed over time, the whole racial thing that happened in the ’60s — that the government never wanted to look at,” Rimmerman says.

By cutting out all those middlemen, Rimmerman could offer lower prices at higher profit margins, while becoming the “Sub Pop Records of the wine trade,” scouting talent and connecting old-school vintners to discriminating consumers. He could also be “the Erin Brockovich of the wine trade,” pointing out that pesticides have been found in bottled wines at every price point including world famous Bordeaux. In addition, many wineries use additives and processing agents like egg whites, milk, fish extract, animal gelatin (sorry, vegetarians), sugar, toasted oak powder, the color-enhancer Mega Purple and dimethyl dicarbonate, a chemical so toxic that merely inhaling it can be fatal. Bringing attention to all this, and to little guys doing it the old-fashioned way, Rimmerman appeals to the moral and intellectual vanity of his subscribers before even mentioning anything as tawdry as the per-bottle price. Only a chump would buy top-dollar status-symbol wines secretly saturated with chemicals instead of the far-cheaper real stuff favored by true insiders.

Rimmerman is neither the first nor the only wine merchant to have built a brand identity around the distinction between industrial and artisanal winemaking. Kermit Lynch, for example, a minor legend in the international wine trade from Berkeley, Calif., who says he has never heard of Rimmerman, has been importing French wines of this stripe since the 1970s. Then there is Chambers Street Wines, a brick-and-mortar retail shop in Manhattan that makes a comparable commitment to selling noninterventionist wines.

But Rimmerman has discovered some of the great noninterventionist standard-bearers, like Frank Cornelissen, who was toiling in obscurity high above the snow line on Sicily’s volcanic Mount Etna, before Rimmerman found him resurrecting abandoned vineyards and vinifying the juice in the strictest of Old World methods. According to Alder Yarrow, a Garagiste fan and author of the influential wine blog Vinography: “Cornelissen just takes a bunch of grapes, throws them in buckets, stomps them, comes back six months later and puts it in bottles. They are the most natural wines in the world.” The result is cloudy with visible sediment, and even prone to refermenting in the bottle. “But when they are good, they are unbelievable!” Yarrow says. “Rimmerman likes that kind of thing, wines that to most Americans are like eeuwee!”

Rimmerman considering a cask of Sagrantino in Montefalco, in central Italy.

Photograph by Shira Young

Of all the purported nicknames Rimmerman offers, the most telling may be “the Great and Powerful Vinous Oz” — celebrating, as it does, a certain Emerald City quality in Garagiste. Rimmerman has doubtless traveled around the world seeking great wine, but he also appears to find at least some through traditional distributors and importers — one of whom, asking to remain anonymous because he does business with Rimmerman, explained that Garagiste can be a convenient way to move a lot of inventory in a big hurry.

Alice Feiring, a New York-based wine writer, claims that Rimmerman has even discovered wines through her blog posts. (Rimmerman, who considers Feiring a fellow traveler, insists the timing of their discovery was merely coincidental.) “He’s not a tastemaker,” she says. “He is picking up on a trend. He is a businessman.” Feiring adds, however, that she knows “people who are very, very, very faithful to him, and give him a lot of money all the time.” Other industry insiders have told me similar things, raising one of the greater curiosities of the Garagiste phenomenon: Rimmerman’s act seems to appeal most powerfully to people with no illusion about how it works. David Schildknecht, for example — one of the most prominent wine writers in the world and a critic for The Wine Advocate, and therefore a man deluged with free wine samples — chuckled over the phone, saying: “I buy wine from him regularly. . . . .It’s pretty amusing to me.” Michael Terrien, a boutique Napa winemaker, calls Rimmerman’s daily e-mails “wine crack,” adding that he has to unsubscribe periodically to stop the financial hemorrhage.

Rimmerman’s personal theory about how it all works — how the Garagiste business model and those idiosyncratic e-mails compel such vigorous spending — fetishizes the human element, the obvious imperfections, like telling his administrative assistant to leave typos and grammatical errors in his e-mail offers — preserving the immediacy of his writing — and never including photographs. “Psychologically, it’s very important,” he says. “If I told you that story but you didn’t like the look of the label” — Animale’s cat, say — you might doubt the pitch. (“This is something I’ve carried for 18 years,” Rimmerman told me, as if confessing a terrible secret. “I’ve never told anybody this.”) He also cites a broader cultural shift working in his favor — “It’s almost like ‘everything old is new again,’ ” he wrote in a personal e-mail to me. “Or the music scene going back to turntables or . . . vintage 1960s tube amplifiers — people crave warmth, whether its auditory or in business, and eventually they come around to what makes them feel good, what keeps them warm — sensory or mentally.”

This idea of analog musical warmth is central to his thinking. In Walla Walla, Wash., after a long morning among the giant grain silos, vast wheat fields, not-so-vast vineyards, and smelly horse corrals of the area’s rural fringes, we stopped at the relatively elegant Waters Winery. Jamie Brown, a vintner who made a living selling bootleg concert CDs during the Seattle grunge scene of the 1990s, is now a sort of Falstaffian rocker/poet/artiste who has sold many wines through Rimmerman. Inside the barrel-aging chamber, Rimmerman tasted multiple vintages of Waters syrah and cabernet, free-associating toward a sales pitch: “This is cabernet sauvignon for cabernet sauvignon’s sake . . . not for oak’s influence, Napa Valley, prestige, Robert Parker.” He spat into a floor drain and took a second stab: “This is the Old World that has come to America. This is like Ellis Island in Washington State. How about that for a quote? That’s a big thing for me to say, because I’ve never found that anywhere.”

Four months later, offering a Waters syrah called Tremolo, Rimmerman instead wrote about Monteverdi inventing musical tremolo about 400 years ago. “He never could have imagined . . . Liszt would use it as a palpitating piano technique or Bo Diddley on the guitar. From Floyd Rose reinventing the double-locking wheel, to the classic blackface circuitry of early 1960s Fender Twin Reverb amps (or Vox AC30, Silvertone, etc.).” He followed this arguably absurd but possibly masterful massaging of his audience with a reassurance to all that Tremolo had an impeccable Old World anti-mainstream taste — “mineral salts . . . natural (ripe) acidity, 12.5% alcohol.” Then he took a quick detour into his global travels — “scurrying about on back roads in Turkey, Croatia, Ribeiro, Sicily” — and made a brief pause to make sure we all knew he really had been in Walla Walla, personally, shaking that winemaker’s hand. “When I first sampled it a few months ago with Jamie,” Rimmerman wrote of the wine, “I was so taken with its truth that I asked to put the offer out then and there (on my BlackBerry, in typical Garagiste fashion).”

I have no recollection of this exchange, nor of any whispered conversation between Rimmerman and Brown beyond my earshot. But Rimmerman swears it happened and, at $39.99 a bottle, it almost certainly doesn’t matter.

Daniel Duane is the author of “How to Cook Like a Man: A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession.”

Editor: Ilena Silverman