World enough and wine

IT starts as an idle thought while navigating the twisting roads of Provence, or at the first glimpse of the terraced hillsides of Spain’s Priorat. For some, simply staring at the constantly expanding selection of Italian wines in a favorite wine store brings it on. There is a pause and a smile as the wine lover dreams about a life spent tootling along the wine world’s less traveled roads, sitting down to fabulous meals with world-class winemakers, taking home exceptional discoveries -- the wine importer’s life, yes, that would be a sweet life.

It is a fantasy that proved irresistible to four Californians -- Emily Weissman and Stephan Schindler of Winemonger, an importer of Austrian wines; Betty Dunbar, whose Vinalia Imports focuses on bringing under-appreciated French wines to California; and Brian Larky, whose company, Dalla Terra Winery Direct, acts as sole U.S. agent for selected Italian wineries.

Each has carved a niche in the rough-and-tumble international wine business. But survival isn’t guaranteed. Importers operate on tight budgets and have to work their way through a slew of regulations as they coordinate trucks, boats, trains and planes to move wine around the world -- and then there is the challenge of selling unknown wines.

Yet Southern California’s expanding wine community is enriched by these intrepid souls. Not only do they bring in bottles that wouldn’t be available here otherwise, but they also help keep prices in check. As independents, they survive by undercutting the traditional three-tier system that dictates hefty mark-ups at each stage of the process by importers, distributors and retailers.

“It’s been terrifying,” Weissman, 35, says. “And hilarious.” She and husband Schindler, 38, have invested everything they own in Winemonger, a company that imports, distributes and retails Austrian wines. “When we started, all we knew was that we both loved wine,” Weissman says. Everything else, she says, they learned the hard way.

Weissman and Schindler met as students at the American Film Institute, but they bonded over the bottles of wine they shared each evening at dinner. Weissman, the daughter of a wine-loving Stanford University professor, has been swirling, sniffing and sipping wine as long as she can remember. And Schindler, whose family owns a tiny vineyard in Vienna, loves the wines of his homeland.

When Schindler wanted to introduce his favorite Austrian wines to Weissman, however, they were nowhere to be found in Los Angeles. One afternoon in the couple’s Burbank backyard they had a moment of clarity: Weissman would stop rewriting other people’s mediocre movie scripts and Schindler would extract himself from a job producing “Star Mania,” the Austrian version of “American Idol.” Instead, they would import Austrian wine and sell it on the Internet.

Purple teeth, red tape

IT took a year to organize the paperwork, which entailed much more than an import license. There were the wholesale license, off-site retail license, label approvals and customs compliance to obtain, and they had to build an Internet site, not to mention learn the logistics of shipping and exporting wine from Austria. Buying trips to Austria were rare treats.

Winemonger’s first shipment landed at the port of Oakland in October 2004. Thanks in part to delays at customs and more paperwork snarls, the first Internet sale -- four bottles to a California customer -- wasn’t made until June 20, 2005.

“We kept getting little things wrong,” Weissman says. “And getting wines from California to other states turns out to be as complicated as importing them in the first place.”

As they worked through the layers of state and federal bureaucracy, Weissman says, “people kept saying, ‘You can’t do that.’ Well, turns out you can.” But since they were combining so many different businesses into one entity run by just two people, no one person had the answers they needed, she says.

It’s been worth it. “Our vintners have become good friends,” Weissman says. “The adventure of finding the wines, knowing we’ve picked great ones, I love that part.”

Weissman and her husband signed then-25-year-old Johann Donabaum a year before Wine Spectator named him one of three leading winemakers in the Wachau. And adding Roland Velich’s Moric, a tradition-defying Blaufrankisch (usually a light-style red, but in this case made to age like a Grand Cru Burgundy), to their portfolio gave Winemonger credibility among wine cognoscenti after Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate singled it out as one of Austria’s most important reds.

“We’re working with the young, up-and-coming winemakers,” Weissman says. “They don’t have the fancy names, so we can sell wines that are as good as the big names for a third of the price.”

Winemonger imports 140 Austrian wines from 18 wineries. So far, they have the permits to ship to 27 states. Winemonger also sells to retailers, but because its own retail Internet price is close to its wholesale price, other retailers have to charge higher prices than those posted on the site, which limits interest, she says.

Restaurants, however, have proven to be a bonanza. Fifty dining rooms in the Los Angeles area now feature Winemonger wines. Its first San Francisco restaurant account, the Slanted Door, has been selling 10 cases a week of Hogl Schon Gruner Veltliner.

Restaurant exposure drives Internet sales. “People who taste the wines go looking for them,” Weissman says. But it took a lot of work and ingenuity to snag Winemonger a spot on the first page of Google search results for “Austrian wine” and “ice wine.” And even today, four years after they began their wine adventure, she says, every dime that rolls in goes to pay for the next shipment.

Surviving the travails of her first wine shipment four years ago, Betty Dunbar says, makes everything that has followed seem simple.

Twenty years of working in wine stores, running national sales for Santa Ynez vintner Brander Wines along with stints working for distributors and importers had taught Dunbar a lot about wine. For starters: It was clear to her that wines from France’s Languedoc and Roussillon were improving and that Chablis from Burgundy was underappreciated. Consequently, there were better-than-expected wines at lower-than-expected prices in these categories.

In 2002, Dunbar seized the moment to launch a boutique import company, Vinalia Imports. She believed that if she could keep prices between $10 and $20 a bottle, Los Angeles restaurateurs and wine retailers would snap them up. Dunbar didn’t speak French. And on her two previous short visits there, she had not been shopping for wine to import. But with the help of interpreters, she figured she could attend something called the Vinisud festival, cherry-pick the best wines and launch her business.

But on the eve of her buying trip, a surgeon’s scalpel nicked a nerve in Dunbar’s ear. Suddenly, everything she put in her mouth tasted metallic. “How was I going to do this?” Dunbar, 45, remembers asking herself. But, as a single mom, with no business partner, she didn’t have anyone telling her she couldn’t do it, she says.

And so, with a second mortgage on her home and no other source of income, she walked on to the plane to France relying on her sense of smell and knowledge of wines to pull her through. Her fail-safe was to bring samples of the wines she was buying back to Los Angeles to taste with friends.

Her first shipment, in April 2003, included wines from 12 producers. Acting as both the importer and the California distributor, Dunbar sold everything she had at her first Los Angeles tasting. She’d managed to avoid any duds, she says, while discovering some particularly aromatic wines.

The first wine she picked up on that trip -- a $17 Chablis produced by Daniel Dampt -- has remained her most popular wine, and now sells at a rate of 100 cases a month.

The thrill of discovery

TODAY, Vinalia imports 143 wines from 43 producers. Domaine des Grecaux is a favorite discovery. A small producer from Montpeyroux in the Languedoc owned by winemaker Alain Caujolle, the wine is a Grenache-Carignan blend with a touch of Syrah. It’s an untraditional wine from a forsaken place where grapes are grown without irrigation high on limestone hills. The difficulty of driving stakes into the ground there has frustrated most others.

“The wines carry the aromas of herbes de Provence. They have great character,” Dunbar says. And at $12 a bottle, she sells out within days of each shipment’s arrival.

Dunbar travels to France frequently now, haunting the regional wine festivals where smaller producers gather by the hundreds. Moving from booth to booth tasting wines, she searches for gems that she can price reasonably for the California market. Her focus remains Southern California, but she’s adding salespeople in the San Francisco region as well. She has expanded her portfolio to include wines from well-known Burgundy negociant Becky Wasserman, and she just returned from a buying trip to the Loire Valley.

She also has to play the currency market. With value wines sold on narrow margins, the falling value of the dollar is a particular strain. “You learn to ride the currency waves like a roller coaster,” Dunbar says. “And you’re grateful for the days when it breaks your way.”

Sitting at a desk she shares with her office manager in two small back rooms in a Camarillo office park a block off the 101 Freeway, Dunbar wastes nothing on decor. She’s saving for her next buying trip to France. Oh, and she’s regained her sense of taste.

Like most independent wine entrepreneurs who play the import game, Brian Larky lives on the edge. But he’s playing at a higher elevation than many. Last week when he was hand-selling his Italian wines, it was to billionaire moguls dining at Montana’s Yellowstone Club. Larky, 44, poured wines and worked the crowd.

“Some of these guys are really into wine, extremely knowledgeable and very interested,” Larky says. “As long as you know your stuff and are comfortable, the evening just flows.” The good news is that the average mogul doesn’t ski when he goes to his mountain retreat, Larky says, so he had the untracked powder to himself that day.

It’s not the life he envisioned when he started Dalla Terra Winery Direct in 1990, he says. It’s better.

A winemaker by training, the Santa Monica native tucked his UC Davis oenology degree into a suitcase and moved to Italy in 1985. “I wanted a different perspective, a view of wine outside of the Napa Valley petri dish,” he says. So he rolled up his sleeves and started cleaning tanks at Lombardia’s celebrated sparkling winemaker Ca’ del Bosco, eventually working his way up the winemaking ranks.

When he was ready to return to the U.S. five years later, Larky was approached by a handful of Italian vintners who thought their wines weren’t selling as well as they could in the States. Could he help them? The seed of the idea for Dalla Terra Winery Direct was planted. “It’s a twist on importing,” he says. “We act as the sole U.S. agents for our winery clients, connecting them directly with distributors in each state.”

The distributors, in most instances, act as the official importers for Larky’s portfolio of wines in their individual states, and the wines are shipped directly to them. He rarely takes possession of the wines. So, instead of tacking on the traditional 40% importer’s fee, Dalla Terra charges a 15% agent’s fee.

“We’re too small to pick up unknown wines,” Larky says. But there have been wines whose rising popularity with Americans is a gratifying surprise. Dalla Terra’s producer in Brunello di Montalcino, Casanova di Neri, was named the world’s best winery of 2005 by Wine Spectator magazine.

Also among the just 13 wineries in Dalla Terra’s portfolio are Alois Lageder in Alto Adige, Boroli in Piedmont and Avignonesi in Montepulciano. Staying small, Larky says, enables him to place the entire portfolio with a single distributor in each state.

The essence of the job is to keep the wines moving smoothly between the wineries and distributors throughout the United States, Larky says. It takes an office staff of four in his Napa headquarters as well as an eight-person team of regional managers working with U.S. distributors. By cutting the importer’s fee, “generally speaking we can lower the prices of their [Italian] wines 20% to 30% overnight,” he says.

When Larky’s not skiing in Montana, he’s in Italy, at least five times a year. That’s often enough for him to be part of the crew of a professional yacht-racing team on a 100-foot carbon fiber sloop based in Monaco. It’s not a glory position -- he’s the grunt at the back of the boat trimming the sails -- but he gets to be on the boat. Being part of the action -- whether it’s wine, skiing or sailing -- is better for him than the sidelines.

corie.brown@latimes.com