Peter tasting in the Montrachet vineyard
Peter Vezan started in the wine business in 1978.
From 1980 through 1995, Peter gave wine tasting classes to students of all ages at Steven Spurrier’s Académie du Vin in Paris. In the late 1980’s when the Académie started asking the students to “grade” or rate the teachers, as a teacher Peter always received the highest marks.
The one missing class in the school’s offerings was “How to Match Food with Wine”. Peter was the first person to accept that challenge and task, and after the 1st course, realised that this was a major task which would require that he do the cooking, in order to day within the budget allocated to him, which meant that he started preparing the course, and the food at about 10 AM for classes that began about 7-8 PM. He took this task upon himself, as he thought that nobody had done an adequate job prior to that time.
In the 10th Anniversary Issue of the Wine Advocate, in 1988, Parker listed the 10 most innovative US importers for high quality wines, made by artisans. 3 of those importers did much or all of their French business with Peter Vezan (Those importers were Wine Imports in California, Arborway Imports and Ideal Wine and Spirits, both located in Boston, and there was no overlap on the wines which they imported. Quite a feat!) No mention of Peter Vezan’s name appeared in the column, because his never appears on the labels, and the piece was about the importers. Vezan’s commercial philosophy has always been that the growers and the importers deserve all of the credit for the quality of the wines, not him. Vezan feels that the more his importers are credible and considered responsible for the quality of the wines, the less he needs to help them sell the wines, the work gets done for him.
In the 20th Anniversary Issue of the Wine Advocate, in 1998, Parker listed the 20 most important people who influenced the quality of wine, and taste criteria in the world, and he was listed, (toward the end given the alphabetical order) but with some of the highest praises he ever gave to any of the other 20 people cited and evaluated.
Peter left the US in August 1978, with a dream, and a vision or idea as to how to start his business at it was and still is. An understudy of both Frank Schoonmaker and Alexis Lichine told Peter in 1977 that the 1980’s would be a decade of explosion in the number of small growers in all of France (outside of Bordeaux) who would gradually move from mostly bulk sales to négociants, on towards domaine bottlings. That man and Peter Vezan hit the nail on the head as far as timing was concerned to be in the starting blocks to find the “new and emerging growers”.
That is the reason that in the last 30 years Peter Vezan has identified so many future super stars before they entered stardom, maybe more than anybody of his generation.
Through the 1990s and the the 2000s Vezan continued to make discoveries, during which time he became a gifted talent scout of the 25 year olds about to take over their family domaines, and greatly improve quality or modernize the style.
Today, Peter continues with the same philosophy and tireless passion.
Peter Vezan Wines 