Taste of Italy: Quality is Key at Italian Wine Merchants
By Brenda Owen
With expensive area rugs on the hardwood floors, handcrafted chandeliers
hanging from the high ceilings and antique wooden cases lining the
brick walls, Italian
Wine Merchants is as much a showplace as a wine shop. Adding to
the aura is its celebrity trio of Italian owners — chef and
television personality Mario
Batali, restaurateur and book author Joe
Bastianich and former sommelier and present store manager Sergio
Esposito — all dedicated to bringing a little of Italy to
America. So it’s not surprising that they should focus their
store specifically on Italian wines.Each a star in his own right,
the threesome has teamed to create a wine shop extraordinaire that
grosses more than $5 million in sales annually. At Italian Wine Merchants,
wine lovers find both well-known names and some of Italy’s best-kept
secrets, says Esposito, who travels to Italy to personally select
the store’s selection. “We are the ultimate destination
for Italian wine in New York City and in the country,” he says.
“We offer a level of quality and service that is unique in this
industry. Yes, we sell wine, but we celebrate it, too.”
Studio
del Gusto
Half the 3,000-square-foot main floor of Italian Wine Merchants is
devoted to Studio
del Gusto, a state-of-the-art cooking and tasting facility designed
specifically as a learning laboratory for those seeking to enrich
their knowledge of the food, wine and culture of Italy.
The Studio features comfortable seating, a warm, personal ambiance
and a bird’s eye view of Batali’s custom salumeria, where
he prepares a variety of sausages and cured meats for his restaurants
while Esposito educates customers about wines.“We use Studio
del Gusto for wine tasting and food and wine pairing classes,”
Batali says. “We celebrate the lifestyle of Italian wine —
as a studio del gusto — where people can learn, taste, and,
of course, buy.”
Studio del Gusto hosts wine tasting seminars with well-known winemakers
and sommeliers but stays away from featuring particular brands.“We
do educational tastings, not necessarily to promote certain products
but more to promote education on Italian wine,” Esposito says.
“So we will do a lot of tastings where we don’t sell the
wines afterward. We do a lot of tastings where we’re just using
samples that are no longer available.”
Wall of Wines
Opposite the Studio del Gusto is the showroom where one bottle of
each of the store’s 400 different wines — about 800 labels
— is on display. The rest of the store’s 90,000-bottle
inventory is stored downstairs in a temperature-controlled storage
facility.
“That goes along with the service that we have for our clients,
we temperature control virtually every wine that comes out of here,
so upstairs we have only one bottle of selected items that we have
on display,” Esposito says. “Our customers appreciate
the extra caution and are willing to wait a few minutes while a wine
consultant retrieves purchased bottles.”
Esposito hand-picks the bottles during his dozen annual visits to
Italy and has assembled everything from the familiar Orvietos and
Nobiles to more obscure labels, like Quintarelli
Alzero and Valentini
Trebbiano, with prices ranging from $8 to $10 a bottle to $1,000
or more.“I also do a huge business in the Italian vintage wine
market and that’s probably one of my greatest strengths —
wines from the ‘60s and ‘70s — and those I buy exclusively
in Europe,” he says. “I don’t purchase any wines
here in the States because there was never a culture of storing those
wines here. In Europe they tend to have natural storage facilities
like wine cellars and root cellars that everyone has in their building
to keep their cheese and wine and other stuff, so the conditions there
are a lot better.” Vintage wines account for about 40 percent
of the store’s sales dollars. They average about $500 per bottle
so you don’t have sell a lot of those to get the dollar amount
up,” he says. The store also specializes in the lucrative business
of wine futures. “We sell a lot of wines before the vintages
are ever released. Because I’m able to go to Italy and taste
these things a year — or even two or three years — before,
our clients have faith in our judgment. So a lot of the wines we have
— and I would say about 50 percent that we sell — are
sold before they ever enter the store,” he says.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Italian Wine Merchants gets about 95 percent of its business through
referrals. “We do zero advertising,” Esposito says. “Because
of the exclusivity of what we do, we get customer referrals ... we
haven’t found anything else that really works as much as that.”
The majority of Italian Wine Merchants’ sales — more than
90 percent — are conducted over the telephone with purchases
shipped to about 30 states. “We have sales people that we call
portfolio managers that handle client accounts and they’re in
touch with them by telephone contact or e-mail contact,” Esposito
says. Even though the store has a Web site, Esposito says virtually
no sales come from it. “We don’t want to sell to people
we don’t know,” he says. “The wines we have are
pretty rare, so we just need that human contact to explain what the
wine is and make sure that it’s for the right person.”
Catering to Collectors
Italian Wine Merchants caters to the wine collector through portfolio
management services and strict wine selection guidelines, Esposito
says. Wine consultants are on-hand to assist collectors in evaluating
their cellars for depth, breadth and drink-ability, as well as resell
potential. “We help our clients manage their purchases so that
the wines in their cellars are best suited for their taste preferences
and goals,” he says. “We stand behind the wines we offer
as well as those we don’t carry.” Esposito says their
selection process is demanding. “We don't carry everything —
only the best quality wines at any give price point. If we have only
one Gavi di Gavi, we believe it is the best one on the market, considering
its price-to-quality ratio.” Though once not even considered
by collectors, quality Italian wines can no longer be ignored, Esposito
says. “In the past decade, the wine world witnessed legendary
vintages in Italy, especially in Piedmont and Tuscany,” he says.
In addition to a selection of wine books, glassware and decanters,
one particularly profitable collectible item for Italian Wine Merchants
has been antique corkscrews. “We have corkscrews starting from
the 1700s,” Esposito says. He finds them on his wine-buying
trips to Italy but also has an agent who searches auctions in England
and France to find examples of unique and unusual items.
Finding the Wine
By specializing only in Italian wines, Esposito has established himself
as an authority on the vintages, something that gives him an edge
over any competition. And he sees nothing but a bright future ahead
for both suppliers and collectors of Italian vintages. “Italian
wines are gaining strength every day, and I know that a lot of people
are doing a lot more with them, but since we’ve kind of branded
ourselves as a place that focuses specifically on the culture of Italian
wine, I don’t know if we have a natural competitor,” he
says. And, with Italy’s 20 regions and 120 different provinces,
Esposito says he has an almost unlimited supply of resources. “Each
(province) has a unique grape variety and a unique wine that they
work with, and it’s only because of due diligence and us traveling
there so much and sourcing these wines and selecting what we think
is the best quality per price point that we’re able to do what
we do,” he says. His philosophy: “We don’t carry
things because they’re chic or in vogue, or because the industry
dictates that we should because there’s a need for them or a
demand for them,” he says. “What I do is just select what
I think is the best quality that is coming out of Italy at every price
point.” Esposito says making quality top priority was a business
concept he and his partners agreed on from the beginning. “My
main focus is trying to get everybody the highest quality within every
bottle they open ... so if somebody mixes a case of wine with 12 different
bottles from here, I think we have a very high percentage that every
bottle has outstanding quality,” he says. “Now if they
like a particular wine or not, that’s a completely different
story because that’s subjective, but what’s not subjective
is what is quality.”
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