Not a Manifesto

Maybe we should have named ourselves Gonzo Wine Company. Our way of sales is highly subjective: we sell what we like, guided by our personal sense of taste, hoping to capture a visceral “truth” about what is good and what we want to see in our shops and on our lists, with a finger in the air to those who would suggest differently, not to judge the wind. As the middle of the much-derided three-tier system, we take our role seriously. Distributors often get dismissed as the merely logistical tier or, worse, as the rent-seeking middlemen taking their cut. It can be like that, but it certainly doesn’t have to.

It’s worth considering for a moment what a United States without a distribution tier would look like. All alcoholic beverages would likely come through the same channels as your groceries, because those are the logistics networks most easily adapted to handle them. Your local wine shop would likely cease to exist. Restaurants would be forced to buy at the retail level. And it would all be geared for efficiency and profit. Sure, you could go online and have wine shipped to you, handled roughly in hot trucks by UPS, FedEx and the like, but your ability to shop for artisanal wines curated by a human being you could talk to would be greatly diminished.

This leads to who we are at AOC. We do all the logistics stuff that distributors do. Admittedly, we’re not the biggest logistics operation in the state, but the wine gets there. Where we do better than most is championing the producers and wines we believe in. The way we see it, it’s our job to educate and proselytize for the people fighting the good fight—the family making honest wine from legacy vineyards, the young vigneron pushing for organic or biodynamic farming because the wines are better, the grower choosing not to tear up a less productive heritage clone, the New World producer bucking the trend towards bigger wines for bigger scores, the firebrand young woman making a name for her wines in a world of his wines… and on and on.

That grocery store scenario isn’t entirely hypothetical here. We came along just after wine landed on supermarket shelves in Tennessee, when independent retail was adjusting to a new reality. Grocery hasn’t got much use for us. A supermarket shelf needs a wine that never runs out. Most of what we sell is finite. And we don’t do merchandising. If our wine is on your shelf, it’s there because you put it there. Our time is best spent giving you the reason to do so. That means you’re stocking wines nobody can pick up with their milk and eggs, which turns “why wouldn’t I just grab a bottle at the supermarket?” into a question that answers itself for the consumer that cares.

The other half of this is what Tennessee looked like before we and a handful of other upstarts showed up. A few large distributors decided what the state got to drink. If a wine wasn’t what they already had to sell, it effectively didn’t exist here. No longer. We took the opposite position: even if we don’t stock it, we’ll get it for you. Special orders, direct procurement, working with importers and growers whose wines had never been offered in this state: that’s how the ceiling moves. Tennessee now drinks like a major market. Ten years ago it didn’t, and that didn’t happen on its own. The buyers here built it with us.

We’re not dogmatic. We just want better. We don’t want to cater to the lowest common denominator. We believe in real value, not a race to the bottom. If we do our job well, small growers making honest wine will be well represented in Tennessee. Iconic estates making the world’s greatest wines will be available as well.

The producers, growers, importers can’t be on the streets in our markets every day arguing for their space on the shelves, lists, and your table.

That’s our job.