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The Rhys 2006 Pinot Noir Swan Terrace, from the Santa Cruz Mountains, is as delicious a New World pinot as I’ve ever tasted. It tastes like tiny wild berries on a rocky promontory and smells like the deep forest, with beautiful balance and a long finish. It’s a really gorgeous wine.

And you can’t buy it here.

Just up the road from Rhys, Bob and Jim Varner are also making terrific wines. Their chardonnays, in particular, are masterful expressions of restraint; the usual California recipe of anonymous citrus fruit, butterscotch, and toast is nowhere to be found. In their place are a strong core of minerality, acidity, and purity. These are wines built to age.

Now, those you can buy here. Theoretically. But you’ll probably never see them on store shelves.

Is there some sort of oenophiles’ black market of which you’re not aware? No, not exactly. But there is a big world of high-quality wine that moves almost entirely through the shadows, as far as everyday consumers are concerned. Most of these producers simply don’t have enough wine to populate retailers’ shelves, which means they can’t interest distributors (who, thanks to ever-escalating consolidation, are less and less enthused about the work necessary to promote microscopic wineries).

So what’s one of these small producers to do? Well, one solution is to find a similarly small, specialist importer or distributor. These have sprung up almost everywhere in reaction to the behemoth alternatives, and there are quite a few in Massachusetts. While they’ll never have enough wine to break into the mass-market racks at your local Keg Korner, they’ll instead cultivate a few sympathetic restaurants and equally-specialized retailers, who will get the entirety of their stock. From a consumer standpoint, this is great if you happen to patronize those restaurants or live near that one shop in, say, Millis. But if not, how do you acquire the wine?

First, find out who, if anyone, carries the wine in your state. The easiest way is to contact the producer, and sometimes this information will be on their web site, though the smallest producers often don’t even bother to create one. Admittedly, this can be difficult if the producer is in, say, Slovenia and you don’t share a language. This will lead you to an importer or distributor, depending on where the wine’s from, and the distributor knows who they’ve sold the bottles to. A caveat, however: big distributors aren’t always thrilled to receive calls like this, while one-person operations might require some persistence to reach. Patience and politeness, in both cases, pays off.

Alternatively (and you’ll need to do this eventually, anyway), cultivate the acquaintance of a specialist wine retailer: the one with shelves full of wines you’ve never heard of, rather than all those cheap Aussies with cute animals on the labels. They can order pretty much any wine that’s available in the state, and they’re usually quite happy to do so…or, at least, tell you why they can’t. They also have ways to find out who carries a wine, if you’re stumped.

But that only works for wines that are actually sold in Massachusetts, like Varner. What about Rhys?

Many small producers in the U.S. and elsewhere in the New World (though not so much in the Old) sell most or all of their wine via a mailing list, whereby wines are purchased directly from the winery and shipped directly to the consumer.

At least, this is what happens if you live in a state other than Massachusetts. The politics of it are too involved for this space (and on this subject I’m prone to wax vituperative, anyway), but it basically comes down to this: distributors don’t much like having their business circumvented by direct sales, and thanks to the “willing cooperation” of state government and the “helpful acquiescence” of shipping companies, it’s not. At least, not legally.

Now…and this does not constitute advice…I’ve heard rumors that there are people who receive shipments of wine anyway. Not that I know any of these people, or condone their lawbreaking, or fail to brush my teeth after every meal and help old ladies across the street. Anyway, the rumor is that some people have wine shipped to nearby states whose laws are not quite so draconian (which states those are will differ from producer to producer), sometimes even going as far as setting up a mailing address at the offices of those very same shipping companies that won’t bring wine into Massachusetts. But again, let me stress: I absolutely do not know anyone who does this. Because that would be wrong.

(First published in stuff@night, 2008.)