Harvey impacted restaurateurs, wine distributors and importers.
Things are slowly coming back, but it’ll take a while to get restocked
A week after I’d ordered the final bottle of my favorite rosé at a restaurant I have frequented regularly for years, I tried again. Nope. It hadn’t been reordered. What? Yes, I got a tiny bit irate. But once the chef-owner explained, I felt like a jerk.
He hadn’t restocked because our friend Hurricane Harvey had kicked him hard in the butt, which is to say his bottom line. On the previous Friday evening, this longpopular place had maybe 20 customers all evening. This night, things had headed back in the direction of normal with maybe two-thirds of the tables full. But the chef’s cash flow was still thin, and he had plenty of bottles of other offerings in stock so … I was simply going to have to drink a different rosé. I know, an outrage. I share this story in defense of our local restaurateurs — they deserve our sympathy and lots of patience given the hurricane-related circumstances — but also to lay some love on our local distributors, whose own cash flows obviously suffer when they’re not getting their normal orders.
The problem for the former is that the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission requires them to pay their suppliers in full within 14 days of purchase or they’ll be put on “the list” that lets the world know they’re delinquent, a stigma no operator wants. Meanwhile, most of the latter are sitting on scary-huge inventories right now, having stocked up for fall when wine sales traditionally take off after the summer doldrums.
For the big guys like RNDC and Southern Glazer’s, it’s water off a duck, so to speak. For the little guys, it’s a serious concern from both a storage and revenue standpoint. A further complication for those who are also importers has come courtesy of the aforementioned TABC, which has been in a semi-chaotic state of late with six high-level employees departing of their own volition or being jettisoned — executive director Sherry Cook among them — following revelations they’d been living too large on taxpayers’ dime.
This summer, long before Harvey hammered us, importers were suddenly being asked to adjust to arcane regulations that have long been on the books but weren’t being enforced because, frankly, they’re outmoded, outdated and enterprise-killing, making it difficult to bring in wines from mom-and-pop-size wineries in Europe and elsewhere.
If common sense doesn’t prevail — fingers crossed, I’m hearing some progress is being made — many wines we’ve fallen in love with may disappear from the market.
Those most threatened by this bureaucratic wrongheadedness are, of course, reluctant to speak out publicly, even if they’re pulling their hair out privately. Fearing reprisals from the TABC, they’d only be harmed for me naming names. But this is, I fear, a to-be-continued story that may ultimately require some serious table-banging outrage on my part.
Then there’s Sam Governale, the most eagerbeaver of customers-inwaiting with an empty cellar who’d love nothing better than to start purchasing wines left and right for Emmaline, his new American-with-anItalian-accent bistro on West Dallas. Governale had originally hoped to open last spring, but the predictable construction and city permitting issues had pushed the glorious day back to late-August/ early September. Then, just when he had the finish line in his sights, here came Harvey’s deluge.
Now, with construction workers in short supply, Governale’s best guess is “midfall,” although the latest delay, frustrating though it may be, could prove a blessing in disguise. A significant roof leak, revealed by the unprecedented, 50-plus-inch downpour, is far more easily dealt with now, before everything had been spit-shined.
“You find out quickly how sensitive and delicate restaurant financials are … three, four, five days of lost business becomes a really big deal,” Governale said, having learned this from the multiple floods he went through during the eight years he spent with Fleming’s steakhouse. “If we had been open or already training — I’ve hired over 60 people — and then had to stop, that would have been way harder on us financially.
“And it’s hard to talk about the launch of a new restaurant in the midst of all this, with everything people are going through. No one really cares. They just want to get back to normal life. So October, as painful as it is for us to stretch out our expenses now, is the right call in the long run.”
A Kingwood native who cut his teeth in food and wine in New York and almost opened a spot in Atlanta before the 2008 financial crisis metaphori- cally drowned that project, Governale plans to have a couple of hundred bottles on the list at Emmaline, the vast majority from small producers with enough variety to keep the wine-geek crowd’s attention.
And, bless him, he’ll be joining the ever-growing ranks in Houston of those keeping their markups aggressively low. Which is to say, “one time,” meaning double his wholesale cost. “The stuff that’s not in retail or is allocated, you might see (a markup of ) one and a half because I feel I can make a little more margin on it,” he said. “But I want people to find wines they’re comfortable with, and I want to do volume. I’d always rather sell three $50 bottles of wine than one for $150.
“There’s just too much visibility on prices today. You can sit in a restaurant, take a picture of the bottle and find out, ‘Oh, I could have bought this at the store for $17, and here I’m paying $52 for it.’ ”
The list will be roughly a third American, a third Italian with the rest a mix from around the globe. He’s got about 80 percent of it set, leaving the rest for his sommelier — he’s close on someone but not yet ready to name names — to flesh out.
“I know we’re going to sell a ton of wine,” Governale said.
Music to everyone’s ears.