more about oliver mccrum

I was raised in southern England, and after studying law for a year at university and hating it, I applied for a job in a wine shop. Fortunately it was a good one, La Réserve (owned by Remington Norman, an academic and former MW who went on to write several excellent wine books). I have been in the wine business ever since. I spent several years working at La Réserve, in Oxford and in London, before moving to the US. As the name suggests, La Réserve sold mostly French wines; in fact the only Italian wines in the shop were magnums of ‘Soave’ and ‘Bardolino’ of dubious provenance, to be used for parties. I moved to the US in the early 1980s and worked in New York for several years, including two memorable holiday seasons at Morrell and Company, then moved to California and worked in both retail and wholesale. 

In 1994 I started Oliver McCrum Wines in Oakland, importing and distributing wine, mostly Italian but also a little French. (We also distributed some California wines from small producers.) I did pretty much everything in the early days, working the phone, making sales calls, and established relationships with customers like Paul Marcus Wines and Chez Panisse that continue to this day. I had the impression that Italian wine was on the verge of something interesting, and after some years I made the seemingly risky decision to work exclusively with Italian wines. We have imported only from Italy since then. The timing was fortunate; during these thirty years Italian wine has blossomed, with a startling increase in the varieties that produce it commercially, the places where it is grown, and the overall quality. 

We generally work with smaller wineries that produce typical Italian wines, from indigenous (or at least historically typical) grape varieties. Some of our grower relationships have lasted for more than 20 years; in fact, in a number of cases we are dealing with the children of the producers we started with, which gives me great pleasure.

After many years of traveling to Italy and enjoying Italian craft spirits like amaro, nocino, and grappa after dinner, in 2015 we decided to dip our toe into spirits importation. Sourcing high quality traditional Italian spirits was a new challenge, one I very much enjoyed, and now we have a short but excellent list of them, produced all over Italy, from Sicilian Grappa to Vermouth di Torino. There is a huge difference between traditional examples of these spirits, made in-house by macerating botanical ingredients or (in the case of grappa) by distillation, and the great majority of commercial examples.