We’d think about wine constantly even if we weren’t importing it, so it’s best just to give in to the mania. OK maybe touring with a rock band it better, but Luc’s already done that and anyway wine importing includes better snack breaks. So what do we do? Our basic goal is to sell wine that tastes good, made in ways we like by people we like. It’s an odd thing: we peer in as strangers, outsiders g
rudgingly permitted to belong in the places and lives of farmers that make exceptional wine. We get a little closer than tourists, temporarily inside the glass, nearer unpolished agriculture and the work that surrounds it. It’s a thrill, a burst of learning that keeps us running around talking to any person/household pet/farm animal unlucky enough to cross our path. We look at the farms of our partner estates up close. We care about all their details and how it adds up to a story you need to know about a wine you’d like to drink. Methods vary and that’s probably essential, but a common thread does connect estates that make really good wine. When we are doing our job right we help you look at those details. I dream of the wines that we import, how they will taste in a month and a year and a decade, who I’ll drink them with at 1am while picking at the remainders of an epic meal in a ruined kitchen in need of miraculous transformation before the dawn. I think about their evangelical power: the revelatory wine that will open a person’s eyes to how great and different this food product is. I think a lot about how these wines and the farms that make them are a continuance of something real, ephemeral and fragile. A glass of wine is very powerful. It can bring us to the present. It provides time in the vicinity of an honest, simple thing. Buy wine from Piedmont Wine Imports and you get bottles that are loved. Someone made it with their hands. 1,001 thoughts and actions across an agricultural cycle created substance. We drink wine with our meals every day and need it to be articulate, invigorating, a completion of foods around us. I want to sell wines that people will freak out about, fall in love with, wines that normal sane human beings will purchase by the case load without regret. Wines that are really healthy for the places and people that made them and for the people who drink them. Wines that liberate us, that add light, that soak up the sun and soil and energy of honest human labor in a small piece of a distant place and deliver all that positive stuff to you. Wines that are awesome, that taste like you dare to hope wine will taste when you stand in front of an anonymous shelf and reach for a bottle to take home and drink with the people and food that matter to you.
