Wines for the Rich and Famous

ST. HELENA, Calif. —  Looking at the wine labels in a good wine shop, you can’t help wondering what all these imported wines are doing thousands of miles from home. How did they get here? Who found them?

Mostly it was professional wanderers of wine country back roads, who have the lonely job of tracking down rumors of great but obscure wine. One of the first of these vinous sleuths in the United States was the late Frank Schoonmaker, whose name still carries enough magic that it is used by a line of imports.

The names of latter-day importers may not be as recognizable to casual consumers. The best-known of them is probably Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley wine retailer who detailed his day-to-day discovery of great back-road French wine in a book, “Adventures on the Wine Route,” a great read.

Most of the importers specialize in one region of the wine world. Martine Saunier and Neal Rosenthal, for example, market wonderful selections of French wines from the Burgundy district. Christian Tapie, who does business under the name San Diego Vintners, imports specialty Bordeaux.

Neil Empson and Marco deGrazia carry prestigious lines of Italian wines. Washington-based Terry Theise and Rudy Wiest, of Cellars International of Carlsbad, Calif., are specialists in top-flight German wines. On the East Coast, Alain Juenguet Wines of France bring in top wines of the southern Rhone and the southwest of France.

Win Wilson and Jack Daniels are unique: They import from all over the place. And they might be said to represent the Cartier Collection of wine. Their super-prestige wines include: Biondi-Santi of Italy, producer of one of the most expensive Italian wines (Biondi-Santi Brunello di Montalcino); Schloss Vollrads, one of the most prestigious names in Germany’s Rheingau, and the most revered of all Burgundies, the wines of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti.

A walk through Wilson-Daniels’ huge temperature-controlled warehouse in St. Helena, in the heart of the Napa Valley shows literally thousands of cases of top-image wine stacked to the ceiling. So committed to the Romanee-Conti wines are they that the amount of current and older vintages they own would sell for about $6 million on the retail shelf.

But when I ran into the two at a local restaurant recently, they were sipping not the famed, rare and exotic Montrachet from Romanee-Conti but a bottle of a New Zealand Sauvignon from an unknown producer. The name is Kumeu River, and the wines of this small producer are superb but, as you’d expect, expensive.

“We discovered Kumeu River by accident,” says Jack Daniels. “We were attending the London Wine Fair and we tasted a spectacular wine, a 1986 Kumeu River Chardonnay. Not knowing anything about New Zealand wines, we tracked down Michael Brajkovich, the wine maker, his father, Mate, and his mother, Melba.

“And not only did we like their wines, but they were the most wonderful people you’d ever want to meet.” Within hours, Wilson-Daniels had become the importers of the wines.

Wilson-Daniels started out as marketing consultants to small wineries in the 1970s. In 1981, they branched out. “The family of Walt Disney had started Silverado Vineyards,” says Daniels. “Even before they made their first wine, we were appointed to represent them, so we changed our business plan.”

Daniels says Silverado fit the profile of the wineries they look for: small, high-quality winemakers with no intention of growing very large. “We never intend to market a wine to the broad market,” he says. “These are specialty wines.”

Eventually, the partners took on three more California wineries, none of which conflicts with the others--Wild Horse (a producer of superb Pinot Noir from the Central Coast), Dalla Valle (which makes deeply concentrated Cabernet Sauvignons) and Fisher Vineyards, a Sonoma County specialist in Cabernet and Chardonnay. Their patient work paid off handsomely when they decided to import European wines. Wilson and Daniels toured Europe looking for brands to import, and in 1981 Biondi-Santi called them--the Italian firm liked their style.

Pricing for the wine that they sell makes much of it unattractive to many retailers and restaurants. The wines of Romanee-Conti, for example, are priced well over $1,000 a case, and bottles typically sell for $200 on the retail shelf--even when the wines are young and still need years of bottle age.

However, many of Wilson-Daniels’ wines are demand items because quality is high and production is small. Three of the best examples of Wilson Daniels’ excellent--and expensive--finds are a dramatic 1985 Marc Kreydenweiss Gewurztraminer Vendange Tardive ($33), which has a marvelously complex, intense spice character that goes beautifully with spicy food; the ’89 Kumeu River Sauvignon ($20), with perfect steely-grassy-hay varietal character, and a deep, rich, spicy 1989 Coldstream Hills Pinot Noir ($22.50) from Australia.