My tale of woe.
If any other Berserkers ITB have them, please post:
In December I went to Argentina on a brief prospecting trip. In 3 1/2 days I tasted 188 wines and picked 24 to taste stateside. 3 of them were already in the U.S.
I asked for 3 bottles each of the other 21 wines to be shipped from Argentina. The shipment went by FEDEX under two waybills. 33 bottles arrived. 30 did not, as the shutdown occurred while they were in transit. Of the 33 that arrived, there were 3 bottles each of 9 wines, 2 bottles each of 2 wines and 1 bottle each of 2 wines. Assuming everything would arrive, I had arranged to ship one bottle of each from my Virginia office to California, where one of my team members would taste simultaneously with the other three team members (me included) in Virginia. On a conference call, we would jointly make decisions. Then we would present the third bottle of the selected wines at our national sales meeting last weekend. However even among the nine wines where all three samples arrived, we couldn’t make decisions because among the missing were other wines from the same producers, and we were trying to decide which producers to carry. As a result, we showed no new Argentine wines at the sales meeting, which was held in DC at significant expense, with people attending from ME, VT, MA, NY, MD, DC, FL, IL, TX, UT, WA and CA. The remaining Argentine samples are… somewhere. I have no idea if they are being stored at 0 degrees or 85 degrees, or anything in between. In other words, if and when they finally arrive, I will have to taste a bottle of each to determine if they are in good condition.
I also had samples coming from France of wines that others on my team had tasted last fall. Most of those also did not arrive, so could not be tasted with the group.
As it now stands, wines that are already being imported can continue to be imported, as they have federal label approvals. Wines whose labels have not been approved, whether samples or commercial shipments, cannot be imported until the government agencies that approve labels reopen.
This is a pretty big deal for me.
On the other hand my business problems are less than nothing compared to a million people either thrown out of work or being forced into slave labor.
Dan Kravitz