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Wine's Incredible
Journey BY MATT GIRAUD Stop! Before your server opens that bottle of wine at your table, give it a moment to catch its breath. It's made an arduous journey from the winery to you, especially if it's imported, and that has directly influenced how sound it is and how much you pay for it. So how did it get here? This, my oenophiliac friends, is its story. After a wine is bottled, its trip to your glass is by no means a straight shot. If it's coming here from Europe, importers usually transport it to a holding area in a port city such as Marseilles or Bilbao, where it sits until they've purchased enough other wines to fill a cargo container (from 850 to 1,300 cases). That container may not come directly to an importer. Phil Smith of P-S Wines says his Spanish wines travel first to Rotterdam, where they're off-loaded until another ship can transport them to Los Angeles through the Panama Canal. Then they're transferred to another ship to Seattle where, after customs, they're trucked to Portland. "Sometimes after we're done unloading a shipment," he says, "we're tired, and we take a few bottles across the street to Montage and open them up. To think that six weeks ago, they started from the winery somewhere in Spain and were shipped around the world until they're rolled down a ramp, into our warehouse, out of a case and across the street to a table in front of us.... It's an exciting journey for a wine." One might imagine that with all the delay in foreign ports--to say nothing of a trip through the steamy Panama Canal--wines can get exposed to a fair amount of heat, especially in the summer months. Some importers minimize potential heat damage by placing their wines in refrigerated containers that maintain a specified temperature, usually around 55 degrees. Adding about $2 to each case, refrigeration is fairly low-cost insurance that the wines will taste the same in the States as they did at the winery. Nevertheless, refrigeration is the exception and not the rule in the trade, since savage price competition makes even $2 an attractive savings. Many presumably hope that transport will be quick, direct and blessed with cool weather. Once a wine reaches an importer's warehouse it can be sold directly to a retailer or restaurant, but it usually makes one more stop through a distributor. Every time it changes hands, its price increases, often by 25 to 50 percent; the bottle that went for $10 at the winery costs about three times as much by the time it reaches your table. The situation is most infamous in Bordeaux, where a combination of custom and law has put just about everyone and his chien in between a winery and the customer. Wine that passes through fewer hands isn't necessarily less expensive, but often it can be better than other wine at the same price. Importers like Smith, who sell directly to retailers, have more latitude to pay growers a better price and make sure their wines are refrigerated across the ocean, even though they have to pony up the initial cash for a container's worth. In Oregon, some wineries use distributors, but many smaller operations prefer to pocket the distributors' markup and handle delivery themselves and to ensure proper handling along the way. Before they reach your glass, wines land at a retailer, who marks them up between 15 and 40 percent, or a restaurant, where the markup can be as much as 200 percent. To increase margins and offer a special product, some retailers have followed the lead of Portland wine shop Liner & Elsen, which pioneered the practice of buying unfinished barrels of wine directly from Oregon wineries, thus cutting out one distribution layer. On the restaurant end, the blistering markups of the past are slowly eroding as some enlightened venues price wines at retail plus a $3-$10 corkage fee--though these are still very much in the minority. But now that it's finally before you, none of that seems to matter any more. It's come so far. You've waited so long. Enjoy it.
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