Delivering the Old World to Houston
Dionysus Imports founder has turned love of boutique wines into great career
A mechanical engineer by schooling and profession, Douglas Skopp segued into wine almost by happenstance. But, when he fell, he fell hard. One day Skopp was heading up U.S. sales for a German firm, the next he was launching an import business.
People who knew better told him he was crazy. Make it a hobby, Doug, they said. Don’t quit your day job, they warned. Skopp did quit, though, even before he had found a first bottle to import. In his mind, too many things had conspired, coincidentally or not, to point him down the wine road.
Best example: The catastrophe of 9/11, which grounded flights to the U.S. and kept him trapped in Europe on a business trip for an extended period with nothing to do. He rented a car and wandered through Burgundy, where he wound up picking grapes on a whim and helping in a cellar while contemplating his future with the world suddenly turned upside down.
Wine was his destiny? Apparently so. But Skopp’s tromping through a Côte d’Or vineyard, borrowed clippers in hand, changed his life. A decade and a half later, he’s using his engineering expertise mostly just to change light bulbs in the ever-expanding southwest Houston warehouse/ headquarters of his Dionysus Imports, the biggest small company of its kind in these parts with 16 employees (10 full time) and a Franco-Italian-centric portfolio of nearly 100 wines from eight countries and four continents.
He also has long been the exclusive Texas distributor for New York importer Neil Rosenthal’s carefully culled, highly regarded small-production selections from France, Italy, Spanish Catalonia, Switzerland and California.
Neither Skopp nor Rosenthal’s wines attempt to cover a broad spectrum of consumer tastes. Skopp’s personal predilections, distinctly Old World, are narrow in focus, and he refuses to venture outside it to expand revenues. Just as he drinks only what he likes, he sells only what he likes.
“I don’t want to say my palate is better or that my wines are better than anyone else’s,” Skopp says. “But it’s my palate, and I want to stay true to it.”
I found out most everything I needed to know about Skopp’s wine preferences the first time I met him. In the fall of 2000, we showed up together at a group tasting downtown involving about 20 people. Though every other guest brought a California wine, Skopp and I both arrived clutching bottles of Gigondas, from France’s Southern Rhone. To borrow a line from Bogey in “Casablanca,” that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
It’s because of that friendship that I’ve resisted writing much about Skopp. But so many of his wines have scored so well in the monthly Chronicle tastings over the years that, as he closes in on his 15th anniversary as an importer, I thought it was time to let the consumer know something about the man responsible for bringing them to Houston.
Skopp graduated from Memorial High School and attended the University of Texas, where he got his engineering degree. Traveling frequently to the Silicon Valley after landing his first job, he’d wander up into the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains, where he discovered the Ridge Winery. A light came on. A further afield visit to Barcelona, Spain, and a fortuitously canceled business appointment in Milan, Italy, gave him time and an excuse to wander through the south of France, where he got a feel for the great wine towns and vineyards of that heavenly and historic area.
The epicenter, of course, is the hill town of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, where the Medieval French popes fled to escape Avignon’s oppressive summertime heat. Centuries earlier, Roman soldiers went to Provence to retire, and they planted vineyards. They were onto something, as Skopp learned.
“My first trip was in 1996, and they quickly became my favorite wines,” he says. “I started visiting as often as I could.”
Fittingly, Skopp’s first Dionysus client would be an affable Scotsman, Walter McKinlay, who only a few years earlier had nursed an abandoned property back to health, then built a new winery, Domaine de Mourchon, above the town of Seguret, just north of Gigondas. McKinlay had been doing business in Houston since the 1960s — at first shipping equipment to the new North Sea oil fields — and he thought the karma made Houston the right place to introduce Mourchon to the American market.
He contacted Republic National Distributing Co., the biggest dog in town, and got hooked up with a man named Rick Jamail, who had been charged with expanding RNDC’s product base to include more interesting boutique producers. But Mourchon was too new and too small for the company to show any interest, and Jamail, aware that Skopp was contemplating starting an import business, put him together with McKinlay.
Skopp loved the wine — he tasted the inaugural vintages of the “Tradition” (1998) and the “Grande Reserve (1999) — and he hit it off personally with McKinlay, who to this day refers to Skopp as “a good lad.” (As he should: More Mourchon gets sold in Texas than anywhere in the country.)
Closing a circle, Jamail, having recently retired from Spec’s, is Skopp’s newest salesperson.
In 2008, Skopp’s head was turned by a small producer in Italy’s Piemonte, Roagna Igino, whose Barbera d’Alba “Perpetuae” I’d stumbled upon in a small hotel high in the Alps a couple of years earlier. With it, he expanded into Italy. Now, about half of Roagna’s total 500-case production of the Perpetuae winds up in Houston.
An early fan of Skopp’s purchasing parameters was sommelier Jonathan Honefenger. Honefenger, now with Richard’s, poured the barbera by the glass almost from the getgo when he was the wine guy at Brennan’s.
“With Doug, it’s not like, ‘I’m the wine salesman, and to hell with everybody else,” Honefenger observes. “It’s all about, ‘How can I represent everything from the vineyard where the grapes are grown to the wine in your glass?’ It’s about making sure everybody is taken care of every step of the way, from the vigneron to the oenophile.”
Skopp’s right-hand person for most of the past 2½ years has been another Houston wine world veteran, Ross Tefteller, who met Skopp while working the floor at the Midtown Spec’s when Skopp was a one-man band, schlepping bottles to the store himself and hand-selling them on Saturday afternoons. Tefteller helped broaden Skopp’s wine horizons, bringing wines from the Pacific Northwest that are Burgundian in style into the Dionysus mix.
“They’re a great fit,” Honefenger says of Tefteller and Skopp. “Ross has brought in some really wonderful Oregon pinot noirs, and he’s following Doug’s ideals of how (an importer/distributor) interacts with wineries and the people who work for them.”
Skopp also offers an impressive, albeit tiny, lineup of California labels that stay true to his “Old World” flavor-profile requirements.
“The type and style of wines we sell,” Skopp said, “are extremely consistent.”
And, it would seem, extremely popular. Dionysus had its best year ever in 2015.