Kermit Lynch: Importer of the Month

Kermit Lynch:

38 years of Fighting the Good Fight

We are lucky to be in New York City as wine lovers. Solely because of the choices we have at our fingertips. When I first started tasting professionally the wines that stood out as having something special about them had a common thread linking them. They weren’t mass-produced. All of them were smaller production wines. I soon started to get to know importers of small production wines and found that a good deal of them only brought in wines to major markets like New York City. They’re all very different companies with different focuses. Some smaller than others, but they were all fighting the good fight.

What is the good fight? It is easy to see as a wine professional. As a consumer it might get fuzzy so here it goes: It is hard to make well-made, unique wine. It is impossible to mass-produce well-made, unique wine. You can make a lot of money by importing a lot of wine and selling it all over the country. It just won’t be well-made and unique. By going to the Old World, driving back roads to find small producers of great wine that you can only import a small amount of is the “good fight”. They don’t make Yellow Tail money but they are bringing real culture and insight to our shores. This, to me, demands respect and admiration.

Kermit Lynch is touted as one of the first people to do this. And has influenced the business plan of many importers today. He started a wine shop in Berkley, California in 1972 and soon after started importing. He is one of the only people with the reputation of a terroir-influenced importer that is distributed nationally. Which is a feat in itself. Kermit has won many awards, honors from the French government, authored two books and an extensive blog, which you can find here. He also produces wine as well from a historic vineyard in Gigondas. What a great guy, right?

Kermit represents about 100 producers and by 2005 only imported around 15000 cases per year. That is less then a lot of producers total production. Thank god we have so many of them here in the store because who knows how long the wines will be around?

That is the one draw back to small production wines: there isn’t a lot of it. This seems to go without saying, but trust me; it needs to be said. In this country we are brand-oriented consumers. We find comfort in seeing a familiar name or picture on the label. The key to finding wine that isn’t advertised or famous is talking to your wine people. We specialize in small production wines here at Vestry. We hand pick wines from the many importers of small production wine. For me, Kermit Lynch is one of the most reliable names I can think of when it comes to quality and uniqueness -especially if I don’t recognize the winemaker's name.