Vinexpo: wine mecca?

As is Mecca to Muslims and Bethlehem to Christians, so is Vinexpo to winery owners. While a pilgrimage to this biennial trade show may not ensure salvation, no one leaves without a mighty whiff of wine trade religion.

By the latter half of the 1980s, the heady days of limitless sales growth and U.S. demand for California wines had run up against the reality of declining consumption, weaker vintages, overproduction, and increasing foreign competition. Many California wineries saw exports as the panacea for their sluggish sales. Surely, the rest of the world was hungry for their delicious, sun-kissed wines. If only foreign buyers could taste their wines they would buy them! A pilgrimage to Vinexpo was clearly in order.

Imagine a hall the size of 16 football fields, a 10 minute brisk walk from end to end (without, of course, the inevitable crowds). Imagine this hall filled with thousands of wines from Algeria and Albania to the former Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe. Imagine this hall teeming with tens of thousands of wine buyers sampling Chinese rice brandy, Hungarian bull's blood, Australian stickies, Austrian Ausbruch, Russian champanski, Maltese Gellewza, Lebanese Cinsault, and hundreds upon hundreds of Bordeaux properties...to name a few.

Imagine Pol Roger Cuvee Winston Churchill flowing from magnums, generous helpings of Gaja Barolo in appropriate Riedel crystal, and La Turque upon demand. Imagine booths with chiffoned string quartets out front and rows of interior offices from whence entire vintages are disposed of between the beginning Monday of Vinexpo and the following Friday.

Now imagine the owner of a celebrated - at least in his homeland - California property watching the sea of international buyers part as it approaches his booth, flow past, and rejoin beyond him as if the booth were a mere obstruction on the direct route to the beer stand or the ham and cheese baguette concession. Occasionally a buyer steps out of the crowd and samples the owner's wares; theft, muttering something about price/quality relationship, rejoins the flow. Meanwhile, across the aisle, over in the Tuscan booths, fax machines roll out orders.

If anyone cared that the California contingent existed, few showed it. Why should they have cared? There were oceans of cheap and perfectly good wine from all over the world to be purchased from buyers whose networks had been established for decades, and perhaps centuries. The vinous Holy Land was, apparently, the domain of the well-connected, which is to say not the Californians.

By Friday, however, neckties had been loosened in deference to the unseasonable heat and mercenary edges had softened after four days of non-stop eating, drinking and schmoozing. Besides, by then, any deal worth striking had been struck and any wine worth trying tried. Business demands gave way to the instinctual love of wine that was, after all, the common ground of all attendees.

And some of the curious drifted into the California pavilion to see what was happening. Prejudices were set aside for the moment. Conversations were struck and comparisons made. Perhaps a commercial interest was expressed in certain of the wines (provided of course, Monsieur, that suitable accommodations can be made in pricing).

Thus, while the relics chez California were not exactly venerated, the temple doors had been cracked open. That, at least, was a start. The crack began with the small, often random, human interactions that are the building blocks of all business. Those who followed up on these inchoate connections - through sheer dogged persistence - established first a toehold and later an actual presence in the international world of wine.

Well, less than a decade later, California wines - like those of their New World counterparts in Chile, Australia, and more recently, South Africa - have become accepted players in the international wine world. Exports now account for some 9% of the total volume of California wines and our top producers are perceived as being among the best in the world.

While many factors (for example, less-than-stellar vintages in other countries, better winemaking, a weak dollar) may have contributed to this success, nothing could have happened without the systematic accumulation of contacts that lead eventually to international sales networks.

The mid 1990s finds the U.S. wine industry at the top of its game. Exports (particularly to western Europe, Canada, and Japan) are up, imports are down. The American market is quickly becoming under supplied. Consumers demand ever more U.S. wines and the short 1995 vintage offers no relief. If past history is any indication, prices will rise (all, of course, rationalized by the most plausible justifications). Absent a stronger dollar any time soon and imports with lower prices from better vintages, the current situation may well obtain for the foreseeable future.

Where does all this leave the export market for our wines? Foreign customers are unlikely to absorb price increases: they can find plenty of excellent wines from all over the world, and at attractive prices. So why should we bother to export when higher margins can be had, for the time being, here at home? Besides, exporting is such an effort, what with jet lag, language barriers, and labeling hassles. And it takes so long to ship and then to get paid. Maybe we should just let the whole thing slide for a while.

Undoubtedly, some entrants to the export market will take this short-term approach. Those, however, who have endured the blank faces at Vinexpo and gone on to build the trust of foreign buyers one by one, will be less quick to abandon their gains. They have witnessed the vast world of international wine, they have watched as markets came and went, they understand that their product is ultimately dispensable.

They have been among the few to greet the delegations of foreign buyers and wine journalists that come to America periodically to learn about our wines. They have gotten to know the foreign press and consumers in their home lands. They have fought for their fair share of federal Market Promotion Program (MPP) funds to market their wines abroad. They have maintained that spirit of optimism and persistence which less than a decade ago cracked open the temple doors.

They will, each spring, continue their pilgrimages to foreign lands. And when the inevitable cycle of demand shifts against them, they will look back and know it was worth the effort.

(Patrick Campbell is proprietor of Laurel Glen Vineyard, Glen Ellen, Calif.)

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