Importers and Intruders
This week I was in the middle of writing an incredible and detailed newsletter on the back of an article in the Guardian that looked at the importance of wine importers when looking out for great wines. To summarise, if you come across a great wine, it always helps to look at who the importer of the wine is because chances are they will have other wines in their portfolio that you like (cough, cough).
As David Williams puts it: ‘The best [importers] have more in common with indie record labels or boutique publishers: they are tastemakers, finding new and exciting wines they feel passionate about, taking risks on lesser-known producers, regions and grape varieties.’ Indeed I once heard The Wine Importers compared to Death Row Records.
And this is all true. Wine importers have styles or regions that they focus on so knowing a few of them and what they do can really help to navigate the shelves of your local independent bottle shop.
BUT, while wine importers are great and all, when an intruder enters a Spanish winery and opens up the vats of wine worth over €2.5 that definitely warrants attention.
And so it was in the early hours of Sunday when an intruder entered the winery of Cepa 21 and opened up 5 tanks, letting the prepubescent wine spill all over the floor. Talk about infiltration!… you’re welcome.
The representative of the winery said that the intruder must have know the winery and the tanks very well as he moved through the winery with confidence and calm and was able to navigate the security mechanism on the tanks. Obviously the winery is therefore thinking this could have been an inside job.
However, of the 5 tanks of juice that were opened, only 3 of them contained anything inside. So, to throw some speculative shade, perhaps this was an act of outside sabotage, external destruction, or cross border vandalism. (French farmers I hear you say?!?) What is clear though is that the intruder obviously wasn’t too interested in the end product.
Speaking of, we’ve got some Spanish wine making its way safely to the UK as we speak and so I look forward to bringing you news of that shortly.
In the meantime, feel free to legally intrude into our stocks and learn all about what this Wine Importer has to offer by clicking the link below.