Terry Theise, a Wine Importer Who Has Folks Talking

By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

If you like wine and don't mind name-dropping, here's the name to know: Terry Theise.

"You know Terry? Terry completely changed the way I think about wine," gushes Andrew Myers, the sommelier at CityZen. Myers has known Theise for nine years but says he still gets "giddy" when Theise e-mails him. "He's the prophet, the master and the dork, too. And when he drops me a line, usually something silly and fun, it makes me think that I rate."

Derek Brown, the sommelier at Komi, says Theise "has this near-spiritual outlook on wine. He's an amazing character and a powerful person in the wine world. And what's great is that he's powerful for the right reasons."

A lot more people know Theise's name these days. In May, the Silver Spring wine importer won the industry's top prize, a James Beard Foundation medal for the nation's outstanding wine and spirits professional. The award hailed Theise for what his cult of admirers has long appreciated: his role as champion of small producers; his success in making previously obscure grapes, such as Riesling and Gewuerztraminer, trendy; and his holistic approach to the joys of drinking wine. "What's always driven me is my passion for wines. I didn't look for underdogs or small producers, but that didn't deter me, either," he says.

Theise, 54, started importing German wines in the 1980s, when most American wine aficionados had never heard of Riesling.

His inspiration: three years in Munich as a teenager -- a time, he says, "when your whole self is formed" -- then nearly a decade after college when he worked odd jobs, including a stint at the country's first McDonald's. (He was fired after six weeks.) Along the way, as a newly "serious" drinker, he increasingly was captivated by classic German wines.

In 1983, he moved to Washington and started work at Washington Wholesale Liquor. After two years as a salesman, he made his boss a proposition: If the company would send him to Germany for a few weeks, he would double its sales of and profits on German wine, which he thought was misunderstood and in need of an advocate.

The company agreed but footed the bill for just one week abroad. That summer, Theise wrote his first catalogue on a manual typewriter and ran off copies on a Xerox machine. "It was very primitive. But it worked," he remembers.

"Catalogue" is almost a misnomer for Theise's annual treatises. The slim volumes do provide tasting notes on each of Theise's selected producers: 39 in Germany, 21 in Austria and 15 from the Champagne region of France. But they also serve as state-of-the-industry reports. Theise, who says he writes from his gut with very little editing, covers wine regions, climate change, geology, personal histories and business trends. Each catalogue is a lively, opinionated and accessible read that could easily replace an expensive extracurricular wine course.

But what most makes Theise stand apart from other wine gurus is the way he describes the stuff. In his catalogues, there are none of the frothy lists of adjectives ("nutty and coffeelike, with still-fresh acidity") found in most examples of the genre. Instead, his thumbnail descriptions of the important Champagne villages describe Mesnil as "the voodoo-doll of the Cote des Blancs, blossoming trees on a humid Spring evening." Cumieres is "for lovers of pork belly everywhere -- and who doesn't love pork belly?"

Theise says he has no rules about how wines should be described. Some he calls "happy dog" wines. "They jump up and lick your face. They love you, and you love them back."

For more complex bottles, Theise tends to steer away from references to specific flavors. Describing a taste as blackberry, overripe blackberry or underripe blackberry is nothing more than "brain calisthenics," he says.

Instead, he prefers images -- "a bolt of lightning," "a glass of grape mojo" -- and textures: "Individual wines don't attract people because you say it's apple or pear or quince. But if you call it sensuous, creamy, enveloping, crunchy or caressing, that makes sense to people, and all of those apply to wine.

"Wine is a beauty like any other," he says, sipping a "gossamer" Wagner-Stempel spatlese Riesling in his Silver Spring office, surrounded by tacked-up photos of Alpine hikes and his wife, former chef Odessa Piper. "If you approach it cerebrally, it will beat you."

That wine is more than just an alcoholic beverage is one of the core lessons Theise teaches his disciples. CityZen's Myers, who has tasted many of the best wines in the world, cites an example of the Theise effect: a 2005 Schloss Gobelsburg "Lamm Vineyard" Gruner Veltliner that Myers immediately loved because its smell and flavor "reminded me of summer days on my grandparents' porch cracking sugar snaps for dinner.

"Terry made me realize that this liquid can actually affect people profoundly and poetically," Myers says.

Theise doesn't shrink from such challenges as convincing Americans that they should drink wines with names such as Schlossbockelheimer In Den Felsen Riesling Auslese. Or that the rosé bubblies now so in vogue are mostly lousy.

Or, perhaps most important, that the big champagne houses such as Dom Perignon and Veuve Clicquot, which produce hundreds of thousands of cases of wine, are marketing their products as "exclusive" and actively trying to drive small producers out of the market.

Case in point: Theise was outraged this year when Champagne Fleury, a small producer, was threatened with a lawsuit because the label on its rosé bore a resemblance to powerful Perrier-Jouet's Fleur de Champagne label. "I can only imagine how threatened they must have felt by the 100 cases of Fleury Rosé rampaging through the American market," he wrote sarcastically in the 2008 catalogue. "Around the same time, I learned that Clicquot was suing a sparkling wine producer in Tasmania who had the temerity to use a yellow label on their fizz. Perhaps the Houses should collectively trademark VOWELS so that the growers would have to call their wine "Chmpgn."

Such rabble-rousing doesn't win Theise powerful friends. But he clearly savors playing David to the big houses' Goliath. His catalogues "rally the troops to fight the good fight," he says, adding mischievously, "You can tell a lot about a person by their enemies."

Whatever attacks his foes might mount seem unlikely to affect Theise, who is almost Zenlike about what he wants and, more important, what he doesn't. Theise could no doubt import more wine; he wouldn't specify numbers but said he does a "handsome business for a small-batch artisan importer, but of course a lot less than the big commercial guys." He also could easily import and distribute wines on his own instead of partnering with Syosset, N.Y.-based Michael Skurnik Wines, as he has since 1999.

"The only reason to do it is to keep all the money, and the price of doing it is onerous to me," he says.

Nor do accolades, such as that James Beard award, affect Theise much. "Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it but don't swallow it," he says, quoting Dennis the Menace creator Hank Ketcham. For Theise, the Beard award is less a validation than an opportunity to try new things: writing a book that will serve as his legacy, or planning events with and for the people who have helped him along the way.

"I want to do gigs with the sommeliers I know," he says, "but wine dinners and wine tastings have just been done to death.

"So," he pauses dramatically, "I'm thinking champagne breakfasts. Now, that would be fun."