I love wine.
And I love South America.
I fell in love with wine just after I fell in love with my wife in Argentina, so much so that I got my friend Yuji down here and started Anuva.
We were tired of wine publications that give ratings based on ad-buys reputations and not on the merit of the wines. We have always been tired of faceless corporations with layers of departments, management and bureaucracy that seem to have lost the spirit of what wine is all about.
Anuva is dedicated to the following principles:
- Hand sourcing great, limited production wines from South America for our members.
- Personal service for our members. We have a background in service; we know that names, faces, dates, accessibility and personal attention are very important.
- Anuva has no call center
- No customer service department
- No voice activated machine to answer your inquiries.
- You will get one of us directly, always.
- Community building. From a wine club with forums and a blog, to supporting small producers in 3rd world countries, to small, intimate groups at our wine tastings, we look to connect with our members, the wineries, and all interested parties in Anuva.
I had been to many tastings before, in France, Spain, Italy, Oregon and California, but wine was never something that interested me much before visiting South America in 2004. That all changed when I tried my first Malbec. I had an epiphany: The price to quality relationship of these wines is incredible.
Unbeatable.
I visited Mendoza and soon went about categorizing wines on my own, charting out everything I had tried in a spiral notebook for about a year. I also quickly realized that most of these wines were virtually unknown. Especially from the smaller wineries that had never exported or barely exported before.
So I called Yuji.
"You gotta come down here! We gotta start a wine club!"
On the Word "Anuva"
Anuva is a made up word in English. It came to me through coincidence when I was thinking of names that would best describe what we were attempting to do.
I spent hours constantly repeating things like "vino", "veritas", "uva", and "Argentina" out loud, and once, I said, "An... uva."
Uva means "grape" in Spanish and putting those two words together just seemed to make sense. Then, when we looked up what the word meant, we were very pleasantly surprised when we found that it is a girl's name in both India and Russia. In the former country it means "knowledge" and in the latter "a new beginning." How appropriate. How very appropriate.