Los Angeles – When Alex Guarachi came to the United States nearly 30 years ago to play soccer and attend college, he was surprised at the absence in local liquor stores of wines from his native Chile. So he started a company that has found success promoting the now-ubiquitous far-southern vintages.
After graduating from California’s San Jose State University with a bachelor of science degree, Guarachi was unable to continue playing soccer because of injury so he decided to take a risk and begin importing the first bottles of fine wine from his homeland.
“It was 22 years ago that we began working with a thousand cases (of wine) in northern California,” Guarachi, a 51-year-old native of Santiago, told EFE.
The entrepreneur began his business from scratch and now his company, TGIC Importers, Inc., founded in 1984, sells 650,000 cases of wine per year and has 60 employees across the country.
For Guarachi, it all started with his commercial vision for the wine business in the Golden State: “Twenty years ago there was a niche here,” he recalled. “All there was was European wine; but no (imported) wine from the New World.”
According to the Chilean, it was about 15 years ago that appreciation in the United States began to develop for the wines of Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Chile. “And that’s our niche; but with an emphasis on South American wines,” he said.
“When I began, I put down $3,000 and George Tralle, a good friend of mine who unfortunately died last year, put down the rest, for a total of $25,000,” Guarachi said.
That first $3,000 investment came from money he earned working as a coach while at university and “some cash I also earned playing soccer,” said Guarachi, who had received several scholarship offers for his talent on the field.
In the early days, Guarachi was the one personally responsible for unloading the merchandise when it arrived and then selling it. TGIC’s net income in 1985 was just $20,000, but now totals roughly $41 million annually.
Introducing the product “was a difficult task,” he said, “because we had to educate people about what Chile is, why Chile made wine and where our stock came from … the stock came from France.”
He said he encountered some resistance at first from California consumers because of their opposition to the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
“But I told them: that’s a political issue; we can’t punish the peasant, we can’t punish the worker, the people who are working the land, because they’re not the ones running the government; they’re the ones producing the wine,” he said, adding that it took a while to convince people.
The South American wine Guarachi sells is produced in Chile by the Montes winery and in Argentina by Achaval Ferrer. But recently, TGIC has also begun bottling its own Californian wine with the Crescendo and Napa Girl labels.
“Crescendo was the name of a restaurant in Napa Valley where during prohibition (1920-1933) wine was sold under the table,” he said.
The company that began as an importer of Chilean wines currently also distributes other brands in the United States and Canada that are produced at vineyards in California, Oregon and Washington.
“I was always a wine lover because in Chile we drink a lot of wine; wine is drunk at lunch, at dinner and it’s part of our diet … you don’t have good food, a good filet with Coca Cola,” he said.
