Californians Want Rum-Crazy Cuba to Start Drinking Wine

Californians Want Rum-Crazy Cuba to Start Drinking Wine
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESSFEB. 3, 2016, 12:03 A.M. E.S.T.

HAVANA — The 3.5 million tourists who flooded Cuba last year downed
oceans of mojitos, lakes of daiquiris and rivers of thin, sour beer.
Only an odd few accompanied their ropa vieja and croquetas with wine —
mostly overpriced, low- to mid-grade vintages from Chile, Argentina and
Spain.

That may be about to change, at least around the margins of Cuba's
once-dismal dining scene. Some of the United States' largest vintners
want to turn this island of sweet rum and flat state-brewed beer into a
haven for robust California zinfandel, oaky chardonnay and powerful
cabernet sauvignon.

Thousands of private restaurants have cropped up around Cuba in recent
years under economic reforms designed to soften the shock of cutbacks in
the troubled state-controlled economy. Particularly on the high end,
those restaurants' clients are increasingly American, part of a 76
percent surge in U.S. tourism — to 161,174 last year — that followed
Presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama's declaration of detente at the
end of 2014.

Hoping to ride both trends, about 100 California wine producers,
distributors and exporters descended on Havana this week for a two-day
symposium to introduce Cuban restaurant owners and managers to their
products.

The California Wine Symposium was organized by the California Wine
Institute, associations of Napa and Sonoma valley wine producers and
Sonoma-based U.S. Cava Exports, a two-year-old company founded to export
California agricultural products to Cuba. The event featured tastings,
talks on California's vineyards and one-on-one meetings between U.S.
business people and Cuban restaurateurs and state officials.

"This is a spectacular meeting," said Orlando Rodriguez, owner of
Waoo!!, a three-year-old, 20-employee restaurant in Havana's trendy
Vedado neighborhood. "It arouses interest, which prompts business, which
creates profits."

Some 50 private restaurants, or paladares, and hundreds of sommeliers
and buyers for state-run restaurants attended the conference, whose
participants included representatives of the E&J Gallo and Francis Ford
Coppola wineries.

It's been legal for Cuba to buy wine and other agricultural products
from the U.S. for years but Cuban officials say they stopped importing
California wine in 2005 because the U.S. trade embargo prohibits
American producers from selling agricultural goods to Cuba on credit.
Obama allowed sales of most goods to Cuba on credit through executive
action last week but lifting the ban on credit for farm products would
require an act of Congress.

Cuba has never been a big wine-drinking country, but it imports some
360,000 cases of wine a year from countries that allow sales on credit.

Darius Anderson, head of U.S. Cava Exports, said he hopes to be shipping
California wine to Cuba by the end of the year.

"We're working on the shipping, we're working on the financing, and we
hope to have them all solved by mid-year, have two or three containers
on the water and get them here by the holidays," he said.

Only a small number of Cuban government agencies are allowed to import
goods, creating a chokepoint of inefficiency and bureaucracy that makes
it virtually impossible for private businesses to bring in large
quantities of goods from other countries. Paladar owners depend on
black-market goods, items bought at retail stores or supplies brought in
the suitcases of people paid to "mule" products from the U.S. and other
countries. The lack of a legal wholesale market is widely seen as one of
the main hindrances to the efficient development of private enterprise
in Cuba.

"It doesn't matter to me if a private person or the state does the
importing. What matters is that there's somewhere to buy this wine,"
said Julio Valdes, a representative of the Five Corners Trattoria in Old
Havana. "It's important for us to have a variety for our clients. Right
now we have Chilean, Italian and Spanish wine that we buy in stores bit
by bit."

Francisco Chacon, sommelier of the state-run Conde de Villanueva hotel,
said he is focused on the ratio of price to quality and the U.S. being
just 90 miles from Cuba offers a major advantage.

"It makes much more economic sense for us to bring a wine from the
United States than from Spain," he said.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report.

Source: Californians Want Rum-Crazy Cuba to Start Drinking Wine - The
New York Times -
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/02/03/world/americas/ap-cb-cuba-wine.html?_r=0