By Jim Boyce
The New Yorker just published a lengthy article by Evan Osnos about ASC Fine Wines founder Don St. Pierre, Sr and his son Don St. Pierre, Jr. In it, St. Pierre, Sr comes off as a profanity-uttering, rough-and-tumble, take-no-prisoners businessman. Based on my experience, much of the language is vintage St. Pierre – I have heard it firsthand in several confrontations with him. On the other hand, while St. Pierre can be intense, there is a steep learning curve when talking to him about the wine business and few people respond to emails as quickly – English writer Jancis Robinson is another who comes to mind – even if the topic is unpleasant.
While the article is titillating as a personality profile, and includes fascinating statistics and anecdotes, I find it a bit thin because it does not explain how ASC rose to prominence, nor – given its portrayal of St. Pierre, Sr as ruthless – include a single negative comment from a competitor aka enemy. It generally focuses on the late 1990s – an ASC wine-and-necktie gift pack promotion that started with a run of 200 and ended up selling hundreds of times more; an investment from Gernot Langes-Swarovski, of the Austrian crystal-making family, that gave ASC the capital to expand – and on the nearly one-month detention of Don St. Pierre Jr by Customs in 2008. There is precious little about what happened in between that resulted in ASC growing from a struggling company to the most prominent in China in the wine importing and distribution business.
In fact, there is more about a 1995 raid by U.S. officials of a stock of 74 million bullets imported there by the St. Pierres, before they ever got into the wine business. (The government dropped the case when it found the ammo had been legally brought in.) This makes for interesting material, as does the author’s experiences at a wine dinner and a wine education class, and obviously a great deal of research went into the piece. But, again, the question lingering in the air is how ASC succeeded. I’ll have more about this on Monday. For now, here are a few excerpts from the subscription-only article (I typed them in, so any typos, as well as the highlights, are mine):
Donald St. Pierre, Sr., founded A.S.C. Wines in Beijing in 1996, in partnership with his son, Donald St. Pierre, Jr., whom everyone calls Don, Jr. The St. Pierres were not winemakers or sommeliers. The elder St. Pierre, who had spent his early years in the automobile business, in Detroit and Beijing and elsewhere, was more of a “hot-dog-and-bourbon type,” as a former colleague put it. But they knew sales. In 1989, four years after St. Pierre arrived in the country, Jim Mann, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, pronounced him “probably the single best-known businessman working in China.” Over the years, the St. Pierres had sold, or considered selling, baby products, gas masks, photocopiers, golf gloves, scrap metal, lingerie, sugar, pistachios, and Chinese and Russian ammunition.
From further in the story:
When I joined St. Pierre at the [members-only Capital Club] recently, nearly everyone who passed by stopped to greet him. “Look at that assh0le!” he replied with a smile, his version of high praise. St. Pierre’s comfort with confrontation extends to his only hobby: golf. At a charity golf tournament in 1997, St. Pierre accused a rival foursome of cheating. The team composed of senior Communist Party officials, including a high-ranking military general and the chairman of a large arms manufacturer. St. Pierre’s friends urged him to back off, but not before St. Pierre had waved his finger and said, “You fuck off. You’re a cheater!” (His protests persuaded tournament officials to give his team a share of the winnings.) I asked St. Pierre if he thought he had ever been too aggressive. He frowned. “What does that mean? ‘Too aggressive.’ Do you like to kill your competitors or don’t you?”
His tactics have made A.S.C. China’s largest wine importer, with annual revenues of more than seventy million dollars. Jancis Robinson, a prominent wine critic in London, wrote that the St. Pierres have attained “a position in the Chinese wine scene similar to that of the Gallos in the U.S.“
And a final one:
On April 8, 2008, twenty-eight days after Don, Jr. was detained [by Customs], he was released. A.S.C. acknowledged a limited number of undervaluations, he says, and it agreed to pay back-duties and fees totaling 1.8 million yuan–about two hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars, a relatively small sum, given the company’s volume of imports. Don, Jr., was never charged with a crime. He says that A.S.C. made technical mistakes that grew out of the fluctuating values of fine wine and foreign currencies. “We were hedging Euros against dollars, and sometimes we did it right and sometimes we did it wrong,” he told me…
The wine investigation widened, and by the end of 2008 it had let to punishment in twenty-nine cases, on wine valued at twenty-five million dollars, according to a report in Legal Daily, a state-run paper. Companies were accused of doctoring invoices and “laundering documents” through Hong Kong, where there are no tariffs on wine imports. The St. Pierres did none of that, Don, Jr., says. But the case was “a wake-up call,” he told me one afternoon at his apartment in Shanghai. “No one sits you down and says, ‘You’ve arrived in China. These are the laws.’ Because people just don’t think they apply to them! And they do now.”
Note: While he was researching this piece, I talked to Osnos several times by phone re the St. Pierres and wine in China.
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