First and foremost is Artisan’s commitment to, and concentration on, small, truly artisanal wine producers, something that was not common in 1998 amongst most importers of European wines. Most importers looked for wines they could ship into all 50 states and in quantity. Tasting experience would dictate that policy would simply ignore or disqualify many of the most compelling wines being produced. While not all small production wines are great or even good, nearly all great wines made in quite small quantities.

The second pillar of Artisan is market efficiency. Most importers have factored in a double mark up in a home market where they distribute directly, one as importer and one as distributor in order to achieve national pricing parity to some extent. Artisan removed the second margin and offered finely crafted small production wines at very attractive prices, forgoing an emphasis on building a national market.

Third is the three pronged selection criteria called QTV, or Quality, Typicity and Value. Regarding quality, contradictory to what one finds in a dictionary, the use of the word seems to have become diluted in such recent usage as “quality control” which actually means defect control rather than the presence of any real quality. Modern technologically focused wine making at larger wine estates was headed down the path of viewing quality as the absence of defects and standardization of wine as a commodity product, rather than the presence of distinguishing, notable, positive characteristics, something quite the opposite of how we view wine.