Turn a bottle of imported wine over and look at the back, just above the legally required Surgeon General warning. There is a single line in small type. Imported by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley, California. Or Imported by Skurnik Wines, New York. Or Imported by Polaner Selections, Mt. Kisco, New York. The line is set in eight-point text. Readers tend to skip past it on the way to the alcohol percentage. It is, in the United States market, the single most load-bearing typographic element on the bottle.
That line is not a logistics credit. It is the editorial signature on the wine. The producer made the wine. The importer decided that this producer, and not a few hundred others working the same appellation, would arrive in the American market under their name. Every imported bottle on an American shelf has passed through a curatorial filter narrower than most readers register, and the line on the back is the only place that filter is named.
Why The Importer Exists At All
The three-tier system, set up after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, is the legal frame. Producers sell to wholesale distributors. Distributors sell to retailers. Retailers sell to consumers. No tier may own another. Inside that structure, the importer occupies a hybrid seat: a domestic company that takes possession of foreign wine at port, clears it through customs and Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau labelling review, then sells into the distributor tier. In some states an importer may also hold a distributor licence; in most it may not.
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The frame was designed to prevent tied houses, the pre-Prohibition arrangement in which a brewer or distiller owned the saloon and dictated what it poured. It was not designed as a curatorial layer. The curatorial layer is what the importer tier became in practice, because the foreign producers most worth importing are small, the American market is large, and small producers cannot stage their own logistics across thirty states.
For a Burgundy domaine working twelve hectares in Chambolle, the choice of American importer is therefore not a freight question. It is the choice of who will represent the domaine to the American trade for the next decade, write the catalogue copy, place the wine on lists in New York and Chicago and Houston, and decide which of the domaine’s village wines and which of its premier crus travel.
The Portfolio As Editorial Position
In 1972, Kermit Lynch opened a small wine shop in Albany, California, on the strength of an interest in French growers most American buyers were not carrying. He moved the operation to Berkeley in the 1980s. Along the way he did something structural to the trade: he introduced refrigerated shipping containers for wine crossing the Atlantic, after noticing that bottles arrived in Berkeley tasting nothing like the same bottles tasted at the cellar door. Heat in a steel container on a summer crossing was the variable. Once temperature-controlled shipping became standard for fine wine, the practice was no longer his alone, but the change was his.
What kept Lynch’s name on the back of bottles for fifty years was the portfolio. Lynch’s catalogue, written in the long-form back-of-newsletter style collected in Adventures on the Wine Route in 1988, treated every entry as an essay about a grower. The book won the Veuve Clicquot Wine Book of the Year. The literary tradition has continued under his name since: Kermit Lynch back labels and brochures read like flap copy on a small press, and the portfolio concentrates on small producers in France and Italy whose work the company has represented across generations.
The peers in the same tier operate by the same logic with different editorial fingerprints. Rosenthal Wine Merchant in New York built a portfolio around growers from less-fashionable corners of Burgundy and central Italy. Skurnik Wines built one of the country’s strongest German Riesling lists through Terry Theise’s selections. Polaner Selections concentrates on Burgundy and the Loire. Becky Wasserman’s négoce, after her death in 2021, continued under the same Burgundy-grower roster. Wilson Daniels, larger and more institutional, holds long exclusive agreements with marquee European estates, including Domaine de la Romanée-Conti‘s American distribution. The list at the top of the American fine-wine importer tier is short: five names, six, perhaps a dozen if the count goes one rung down.
What that shortness means, structurally, is that a great deal of the European fine-wine market in the United States is filtered through fewer editorial decisions than the average wine list implies. The Burgundies a sommelier in Austin or a buyer in Seattle places on a list are most often the Burgundies one of these houses chose to bring in, not because a conspiracy decided so, but because the freight and clearance economics of small-domaine wine make the small-importer route the working route. The portfolio is the filter.
And what is in a portfolio is only half the editorial position. What is not in it is the other half. Kermit Lynch does not import Bordeaux first growths. Rosenthal does not chase the Napa cult-Cabernet roster. Each portfolio is a set of inclusions and a set of refusals. Producers whose work falls between the editorial profiles of all five or six houses can struggle to reach the American market without the longer and more expensive route of self-importing through a domestic agent.
Reading The Back Label
The practical consequence for a reader is the one easiest to act on. The same producer, in two different markets, will frequently read as two different presences on a shelf. A Loire grower imported into the United Kingdom by a London company with a Burgundy-anchored list will appear there alongside a different set of neighbours and reach different restaurants than the same grower imported into the United States by a Loire-focused American house. The wine in the bottle is the same wine. The market position is different.
The reader who starts looking at the importer line for a season will begin to recognise houses by signature. A back label that reads like a paragraph of an essay, rather than a freight credit, is most often a Lynch label or a Rosenthal label. A Burgundy under a Wilson Daniels line is a different proposition, commercially and stylistically, than a Burgundy under a small-importer line. Bottles from one importer tend to share an editorial sensibility the same way books from one publisher do, and once a reader has identified a house whose taste matches their own, the importer line becomes a faster shelf signal than the appellation.
None of this displaces the producer. The wine is the producer’s work, the vintage is the vineyard’s year, the appellation is the place. But the wine arrived on the American shelf because an importer chose it, wrote it into a portfolio, and signed the back of the bottle in eight-point type. The line is small. The decision behind it is structural. A reader who learns to read it ends up better oriented to the European fine-wine market than the catalogue copy alone offers.
Look at the back of the next imported bottle on the table. The line is there. It has always been there.
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