A Truly Personal Investment in Argentina and Wine

 

Argentine Wine On November 3, 2004, only 36 hours after stepping off a plane from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires, Daniel Karlin met the girl he was going to marry. They just got married in July.

In the interim, Karlin, with the help of his wife Lourdes, started Anuva Wines, a company that sources, imports, distributes and markets boutique wines from Argentina for the U.S. market. The original impetus for the business came from a simple observation that tourists to Argentina fell in love with Malbec and Torrontés—the quintessentially Argentine varieties—just like Karlin did when he arrived. The problem was that they had virtually no way of getting more of these rare gems in the U.S.

Karlin created a wine club to ship specially selected wines from Argentina directly to American tourists who had visited Argentina. They could then enjoy these different collections of wines—all hand selected by Karlin and a panel of wine experts and all from Argentina—in their homes after returning from their trips. Anuva Wines now ships these exclusive wines to 34 states in collections featuring limited productions of the classics Malbec and Torrontés and also unique varieties like Bonarda and Tannat. Setting up this home delivery service, however, wasn’t as simple as Karlin thought it would be.

“We spent a lot of money on lawyers to be able to understand how to ship wine to people,” Karlin says with a smile. The alcoholic beverage industry in the U.S. is highly regulated. In addition to Anuva’s shipping service to clients and wine club members across the U.S., they have the only wine-tasting service for tourists in Buenos Aires. Anuva also offers in-home wine tastings in select cities in the U.S.

Karlin grins again when he talks about his discovery of Julian Cavagnaro’s Viña María vineyard. Cavagnaro’s great grandfather immigrated to Mendoza from Italy and settled their ancestral land in 1891. Now Julian, the namesake, makes a little-known yet award-winning, 4000-bottle production, single-vineyard Malbec called Cavagnaro Reserva. “I shared it with some retailers in New York and Los Angeles. They all guessed that the retail price to be double what we sell it for,” Karlin remarks.

Because of its success with brands like Cavagnaro, Anuva is now branching into the wholesale side of the business where they see even more upsides. “Since the financial crisis, we realized that price points are everything and that’s where Argentina wins,” says Karlin.

With a lower average cost per liter than any other major wine-producing country in the world, Argentina is growing by leaps and bounds. Not only have they increased their market share of imported.....




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