The French connector

Becky WASSERMAN was a 31-year-old mother of two when she moved her family to Burgundy in 1968 because her painter-husband had heard that the light there was wonderful. It didn’t hurt, of course, that he was also quite fond of Burgundy wine.

Wasserman moved willingly, having been what she calls “an infant Francophile -- I fell in love with France the first time I heard ‘Clair de Lune.’ ” But she didn’t know much about wine. Indeed, she got drunk at her first tasting in France because “I didn’t realize you were supposed to spit.”

Wasserman has long since shed both her painter-husband and her ignorance about wine. She’s been remarried since 1989, and this year she’s celebrating the 25th anniversary of Sarl Le Serbet, the highly regarded, Beaune-based wine exporting company that she and her current husband, Russell Hone, jointly own with 36 other American and French shareholders.

With a burgeoning portfolio -- 62 growers in Burgundy, 23 artisanal Champagne makers and 35 other winemakers scattered throughout France -- Wasserman is a one-woman conglomerate. In her spare time, she also runs a small, old-time Burgundy negociant firm, Camille Giroud, which was purchased by friends two years ago.

She is now directrice generale of Camille Giroud. “That means I buy some grapes, pick some grapes and vinify the wine,” she says. “I’m also in charge of their 350,000-bottle cellar of old wines going back to 1937. I can only do all that because their office is walking distance from mine.”

How did Wasserman make the transition from American housewife and mother to successful vintner in a country as notoriously chauvinistic as France?

She started in barrels, not wine itself, at a time when the cooperage industry was financially troubled.

Jean Francois of the highly regarded cooperage firm Francois Freres lived near Wasserman and her husband, and in 1976 he asked if she might like to help him sell some barrels in the United States.

“I’d never sold anything in my life,” she says. She was a musician, not a merchant; with a ballerina mother, she had grown up taking harpsichord lessons, hoping to be a classical composer. But that hadn’t worked out, and now, with her marriage a little shaky, she thought it might be wise to start earning some money and creating a bit of independence for herself. She agreed to try selling barrels.

“The cooperage people didn’t care whether I was a man or a woman, French or American,” she says, “as long as I could help. So I didn’t have any trouble.”

Well, she had a little trouble.

“I was a total failure at first,” she says. “He gave me one small barrel to use as a sample in California, and I carried it everywhere in my rented car. I smoked a lot then, so the barrel always smelled terrible, and no one wanted to buy any barrels from me if they smelled like that.”

Even worse, Wasserman didn’t really know much about how wine aged in barrels, so she couldn’t mount a terribly effective sales pitch. But she’s a quick study, and in the course of her travels in the California wine country, she met two influential industry pioneers -- Richard Graff, founder of the Chalone Wine Group, and Andre Tchelistcheff, the legendary winemaker behind Beaulieu Vineyard’s Georges de Latour Private Reserve Cabernet, among other wines. Both men took a liking to her, introduced her to others in the wine industry and gave her what she calls “invaluable pointers on selling barrels.”

Much to her surprise, she was soon selling not only barrels but wine.

“A lot of people I met in California said, ‘You live in Burgundy. You seem to have contacts there. Couldn’t you put together a little list of some of the good, small Burgundy producers whose wines we should be buying and drinking?’ ”

A warm, friendly but no-nonsense woman, Wasserman started doing just that a year after her first barrel-selling expedition. At first she was the Burgundy agent for Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley wine importer, but after four years, she was on her own.

“Then I did have some trouble,” she says. “There weren’t any women selling wine in the U.S. in 1977, and when I came here with my wines, many retailers wouldn’t even see me. Besides, I was representing wineries most of them had never heard of before.”

But Wasserman persevered. It took her about five years to get established, and by then she had developed a reputation as one of the most knowledgeable wine brokers in Burgundy.

“The Burgundians were very kind to me from the very beginning,” she says. “Most of them, especially the smaller ones, weren’t exporting much then, and they were basically grateful to me because I was awfully good at the complex paperwork necessary to export wine to the U.S. I made it easy, instead of a terrible chore for them.”

Two years later, in 1979, Wasserman started her company, Sarl Le Serbet, with a simple policy inscribed on her brochures in Latin:

“Non vendimus quod non bibimus”: “We don’t sell what we don’t drink.”

Or as she put it to me over lunch, “If we don’t like it, we can’t sell it.”

A quest for sincerity

What Wasserman likes to drink and sell are wines that have what she calls “both grace and an uncluttered intensity, the taste of the grape and the terroir, wines that have not been heavily extracted or over-oaked, wines that go with food.

“I like real Burgundies,” she says, “not those dark, bigger-than-life Burgundies that some in Burgundy made in the 1990s to please certain critics and importers. I want what I consider to be ‘sincere’ wines.”

“Sincere” wines? I tend to grimace when I hear such anthropomorphic language applied to a bottle of grape juice, but before I could react, Wasserman quickly explained:

“I mean wines made by people doing their level best to be true to where they are, winemakers who are interpreters of the terroir, not stylists imposing their ideas on the terroir.”

Wasserman’s clients tend to be small wineries, with holdings of just 20 to 30 acres, and before agreeing to take on a winery, she visits and tastes the wines. Then she invites the winemaker to send his wines to her office, where her husband makes lunch and they and their staff drink and eat together.

“Sounds of appreciation are weightier than words,” she says. “We grade by ‘oohs’ and ‘mmms,’ six being the ultimate accolade.”

It doesn’t sound terribly scientific, but it does sound like fun. Because her portfolio includes several of my favorite Burgundies -- the reds from Denis Bachelet, Michel Lafarge and J.F. Mugnier and the whites of Comtes Lafon, Francois Jobard and Jean-Noel Gagnard -- I’d be happy to chime in with six “oohs” and six “mmms.”

In fact, that’s exactly what I did a a few years ago when I first met (and had dinner with) Wasserman and Hone, at their home in Bouilland, about 10 miles northwest of Beaune. We drank a Volnay from Lafarge and a Gevrey-Chambertin, Vieilles Vignes, from Bachelet, and we ate and talked into the night.

Now 67, with curly, graying hair, Wasserman seems comfortably settled into her expatriate life. She ran into financial problems twice -- in the mid-’80s and the mid-’90s, both times when clients in the U.S. went bankrupt and couldn’t pay for the wine they’d ordered.

But that’s behind her now. The company is solid, and -- best of all, she says -- her two sons, Paul, 37, and Peter, 39, have joined the wine business, Paul here, at Woodland Hills Wine Co., and Peter in Burgundy as part of her company.

What more could any mother, in or out of the wine business, ask for?

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.