Every side of the table.

Paris, behind the counter

I owned and ran two wine shops in Paris (pictured). Retail teaches what no export role can. I have sold wine to French consumers across a counter, watched what they pick up and what they put back, and taken a struggling shop from 9% to 34% gross margin before selling the business.

Import and négoce

Import and distribution roles with Sera Wine Imports / M. Chapoutier, and commercial roles with Maison Bouey and Bernard Magrez. Reading producers’ offers, deciding what enters a book and what does not, and learning why most pitches fail before the tasting.

Export, EMEA

Export roles across the UK, the UAE, and the Netherlands. Different compliance, different buyers, same lesson. A market rewards the producer who learned its rules before arriving.

since 2018

The United States

Since 2018 my work has been the American market, and it still is. I run US sales for a premium imported wine brand, across national accounts spanning big-box retail, specialty independents, and marquee restaurant groups: national distributor relationships, key-account negotiation, and expansion across the whole of the US, open states, franchise states, and control states, monopolies included, from inside the three-tier system. Distributor meetings, depletion reviews, price postings, program calendars. The actual mechanics this site describes. The specific accounts and the brand are the producer’s business, not mine to publish here; the roles and dates are verifiable on LinkedIn.

The practice

Alongside that, I advise wine and spirits producers on US entry and growth through three defined engagements. Deliberately few at a time: every brief and every model passes through my own hands, at a scope and a fee fixed before you commit. If the timing is wrong or the fit is not there, I say so early.