About
Our story begins five thousand miles away…
… where cowboys still sleep under the stars using their saddle bags as pillows…
…where women work looms under the early dawn’s first light…
…where the nearest city is six-hours away across a jagged mountain landscape…
…where heaven and earth seem to become one on a clear, boundless horizon…
…where small, virtually unknown wine-makers continue a tradition nearly 500 years in the making…
The year was 2005, and I had just arrived in Northwestern Argentina. It was there that I discovered the small wineries that produce the highest altitude wine in the world.
Visiting these wineries is unlike anything you’ll experience in Napa or Bordeaux.
Getting to them often involves a grueling six-hour drive up a steep mountain road so misty you can barely see ten feet ahead… across a desert flatland so barren it looks like the surface of the moon… and through an alien landscape of jagged rocks like an ocean frozen in the midst of a storm…
Suddenly, the road (or more accurately, dry river bed) drops down into a green valley. At first, you are overwhelmed by the beauty of such an oasis all the way out here, in the shadow of the Andes mountains. Then you taste the wine…
When I popped my first bottle… when those hints of balsamic, leather, and camphor wood drifted across my palate…
…when I first felt those ripe tannins grip my cheek…
…it was as if I was finally tasting a wine that was alive… a wine in the old world tradition of what wine is supposed to be.
After my experience, I couldn’t go back to the same old flimsy retail wines…
I was at a dinner party where the host produced a bottle of California Cab from a very well-regarded vineyard owned by a good friend ours… this a $100+ bottle of wine mind you…
…and it tasted… like nothing… The guests may as well have been drinking water.
All the life had been sucked out of it by modern winemaking techniques like seem like they were invented at Dow Chemical…
Meanwhile, the wine I tasted in Argentina was made from handpicked grapes… fed with natural snowmelt water that trickles down from mountain peaks 10,000 feet high… from vines originally taken from France well over one hundred years ago… vines that don’t even exist in Europe anymore!
The precise “microclimate” that produces this wine can only be found in a single isolated corridor of the Southern Hemisphere… where the sun shines 360 days a year… and old cowboys drive enormous herds of longhorns across high mountain plateaus and deep hidden valleys…
I began to wonder what other astounding wines might be found in unique regions and microclimates all over the world. Surely, every country must have its small, hidden gems.
Still, the problem remained getting these wines to American shores. After all, the wineries I was interested in were mostly too small for a major importer to spend time on.
That’s how I came up with the idea of a partnership. I would band together some good friends to import the world’s great wines to American shores – sometimes for the first time ever. If we could just get enough people together to fill an entire shipping container, we could make it work.
And so began the Bonner Private Wine Partnership.
Today, our team includes a retired winemaker, a full-time “wine explorer” who serves as our eyes and ears on the ground, a top international sommelier, and a boutique importer with connections at 45 wineries across the world.
Our mission is to search the world for unknown, underappreciated, but astounding wines.
In France, they say that a great wine comes not from the grape, but from the character of the man who made it.
At the Bonner Private Wine Partnership, we don’t care about labels. We don’t give a hoot about points. We don’t charge big markups.
Above all else, we seek character.
Sincerely,
Will Bonner
Founder, Bonner Private Wine Partnership
