by Randy Caparoso The author circa 1998, when he won Restaurant Wine’s “Concept of the Year Award.” PHOTO COURTESY OF RANDY CAPAROSO
During my 25 or so years as an on-premise wine buyer, I had distributor and supplier colleagues who were my best friends—or my worst enemies.
An enemy, for instance, would be someone who plays golf with your boss and tells him I am his worst possible hire. (True story—my boss told me.) I suppose, from his perspective, I was a bad hire because I was not inclined to buy all his wines, but I would say he was an unreliable source.
At one point, I was running wine programs in nearly 20 locations in ten different states. I had one close friend who worked as a supplier in several of those markets, so I knew my name inevitably came up in conversation. One day I asked her: What do distributors think of me out there? She said, “You kidding me? Most of them hate you.”
I was not surprised. They probably saw me as more of a nightmare than a friend because, whenever the business I worked for entered a market, we came in with a basic program common to all our stores. It’s not like I wasn’t aware that a distributor’s job is to place new products and make their quotas. (Later on, for six years, I operated my own wine label and also had to implement sales incentives with my distributors in 12 different states.)
This Article was originally published on The SOMM Journal
