That great bottle needn’t be just a holiday memory

YOU’RE on vacation, sitting in a small bistro in Burgundy -- or in Alsace, or Provence or the Loire -- and you ask the waiter to recommend a good local wine. He brings a bottle you’ve never heard of. You taste it. You like it.

You like it so much, in fact, that you jot down its name and order it a couple of days later at another bistro. You like it even more. Then, when you come home, you try to find it in your local wine shop. No luck. You call a couple of other wine shops. Still no luck. You check the wine lists at your favorite restaurants. Nope.

Virtually everyone I know who’s vacationed in France -- or in Italy, Spain or Germany, for that matter -- has had this experience. I suspect the same is true of those who have traveled in other wine-growing regions -- in Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, wherever.

Although the United States imports more than 130 million gallons of wine a year, that’s but a tiny fraction of the world’s wine production. France alone, for example, produces about 1.5 billion gallons of wine a year, only 30 million gallons of which (about 2%) are imported into the United States.

So what do you do when you fall in love with a wine abroad and can’t find it here?

That depends.

Three years ago, I came back from Spain giddy with excitement over Albarino, an inexpensive white wine from the Rias Baixas area of Galicia, in the windy, western part of the country. It wasn’t just any Albarino I had discovered and craved; it was the Albarino made by Granbazan, and it cost all of $14 a bottle. Unfortunately, while Albarinos from several other producers were available here, the Granbazan was not.

Frustrated, I decided to try the Spanish government. I looked up Spain in the phone book and found something called the Spanish Commercial Office. A woman there gave me the name of a man who knew all about Spanish wines imported into the United States. That guy gave me the name of a small importer in New Jersey. We spoke on the phone and -- voila -- the Granbazan was soon in hand (and on the dinner table).

This year, in Tuscany, we drank two wonderful wines that we’d never tried before. One was a super Tuscan called Grattamacco, from the magnificent 1997 vintage. It was young and a bit tannic, but my wife, in particular, rhapsodized about its rich, full, smooth flavor. We both liked it so much when we first had it at a friend’s house in Florence that we ordered it as soon as we saw it on a wine list, at a restaurant not far from the house we rented a few days later in Panzano.

The other wine we discovered on that trip was an excellent Chianti Riserva from Colle Lungo, also a ’97.

Alas, as we learned when we returned home, both wines were unavailable in any of the wine stores we usually patronize in the Los Angeles-Orange County area.

I was about to give up when I asked about the wines at the Wine Exchange in Tustin.

“We don’t have them, but why don’t you try Wine-Searcher.com,” the store clerk suggested.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a free online service that helps you locate hard-to-find wines.”

I went home and tried.

Bingo.

Well, sort of bingo.

The Grattamacco was available at the San Francisco Wine Trading Co. The Colle Lungo was available at Park Ave. Liquor in New York. Hmmm. Not exactly around the corner. Maybe I should’ve looked for them in a wine shop in Tuscany and brought them back with me. But I hadn’t wanted to schlep wine from store to car to house to car to hotel to taxi, and I hadn’t wanted to have yet another package to take on the airplane, given the current carry-on restrictions. So, what to do now?

Casting a wider net

Wine-Searcher said I could sign up for its “Pro Version” ($15 a year) and get a more complete list of retailers for both wines. I signed up.

The Grattamacco also was available at two stores in Italy and one in Switzerland. The Colle Lungo was available at a store in Paso Robles, Calif., at a store in Lewisburg, W.Va., at two stores in Italy and at one each in Scotland and Germany.

Great. A Los Angeleno buying an Italian wine via Scotland.

Doesn’t Wine-Searcher have any stores in Southern California? Yes, they do. In all, Wine-Searcher.com lists almost 800 wine retailers -- and more than half a million different wines -- worldwide, and when I clicked on their retailers list, the first one that popped up was 20-20 Wine Merchants in West Los Angeles. The Wine Exchange also is listed, as are more than 20 other stores in Southern California.

But neither of my wines seemed to be available in any of those stores. (Fortunately, in California we can have wine shipped to us from other states and countries -- something that’s prohibited in many other states.)

Wine-Searcher.com is the brainchild of Martin Brown, a 44-year-old native of New Zealand, where Wine-Searcher is officially based (though it actually operates out of London, where he now lives). Brown started Wine-Searcher in 1999 and he says his site has about 70,000 different visitors a month, 65% of them in the U.S.

I wondered if his was the only such site. It isn’t.

Last year, Julian Berkin, a longtime publisher of educational materials in Illinois, started a similar, albeit smaller and more costly service, and he has about 40,000 wines and 100 retailers -- 10 in Southern California -- available on his WineAlert.com site.

Subscribers pay a $30 annual fee to use WineAlert.com -- or they can link to the site without charge through eRobertParker.com, the wine critic’s Web site. (A subscription to Parker’s site costs $99 a year.)

Users can search for a particular wine on Parker’s site, and if he’s reviewed it and if it’s available at one of the WineAlert.com retailers, you can click on the “buy it online” button for a list of retailers and their prices.

WineAlert.com is somewhat more user-friendly than is Wine-Searcher.com; it even includes a sound clip giving the correct pronunciation for more than 7,000 wines. But WineAlert.com wasn’t much help on my Tuscan quest. None of its retailers had the ’97 Colle Lungo; the only one who had the ’97 Grattamacco was in England, and he would sell it only by the case.

And now for the real test

I decided to order the Grattamacco from the San Francisco Wine Trading Co. It was $69.95 -- surprisingly, about $10 less than we’d paid for it when we’d decided to splurge at the restaurant in Tuscany.

Ordering was easy, and the service was impressively professional. I clicked on the wine merchant’s name on the search results page, then clicked on the e-mail button to ask if I could buy just one bottle. An e-mail answer came back in 30 minutes, saying I could do so. Shipping would cost $7.50, plus $2.50 for an insulated shipper, the e-mail said, and payment could be made by credit card, either online or by calling an 800 number.

When I called, the store clerk said the bottle would be shipped the next business day, “unless it’s 90 degrees out, in which case we’ll delay it.”

The wine arrived two days later.

We let it rest for three weeks, then decided to open it one night last week when Lucy made a rustic pasta -- penne with pancetta, Parmigiano-Reggiano, olive oil and garlic.

Remembering that the Grattamacco had been a bit tannic in Tuscany, I decided to decant it just before we sat down, hoping that some aeration might soften it some. While Lucy brought the pasta to the table, I found myself thinking about the wine merchants I’d heard grumble over the years about customers who came in, bought a wine they’d had on vacation, then returned to complain that it wasn’t as good as they remembered.

What the disappointed vacationers seemed to forget, of course, is that there’s often something magical about drinking a wine near its birthplace, when you’re on a carefree holiday in a lovely setting, that can’t be duplicated at the dining room table, no matter how much you love your house, your family and your spouse’s cooking.

Would the Grattamacco also be a disappointment?

We sat down. I poured. We sipped.

“Delicious,” Lucy said. “Fabulous.”

Then she remembered how our friend in Florence had announced, in the most melodramatic tones, her appreciation of the Grattamacco when she first tasted it with us. We didn’t really understand her comment then, but now -- grinning mischievously -- Lucy repeated it, in an equally stentorian fashion.

“The doctor,” she proclaimed, “is in the house.”

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David Shaw can be reached at [email protected].