Quintessential Aims to Beef Up Domestic Wine Portfolio

Dear Client: Importer and distributor Quintessential Wines, owned and operated by the Kreps family, now represents about 38 wineries with an annual case count of about 1.1 million cases.  Your editor recently caught up with co-owner Dennis Kreps in Houston--tasting this year's Beaujolais Nouveau wines, owned by Franck Duboeuf and imported by Quintessential--to discuss dealing with tariffs, market trends and what the company's been up to lately.  THE TARIFF IMPACT. Currently, Quintessential's portfolio skews towards imports at about an 80/20 split. The company