We’ve never had a market,” says Nicolas Paul-Marie Palazzi, Miami-based owner of PM Spirits. “Fifteen years ago there wasn’t a market, and there’s no market now.”
This seems an odd thing for the founder of a successful spirits-importing company to say. But it’s true in one way: Palazzi doesn’t really identify markets; he identifies bottles. He finds spirits he loves, brings them into the country, and then goes looking for the handful of people who will appreciate them, too.
Photo by DAVID SALAZAR
Palazzi, who moved to New York from his native France in 2004, has emerged as one of the most admired spirits importers among aficionados and collectors, almost to the point of cultishness. His portfolio features outlier Cognacs, Armagnacs, single-malt whiskies, and big, funky rums. These include unicorns like Jacky Navarre Cognac, L’Encantada Armagnac, and Hampden Estate rums.
“The French are often the most traditional, and they like rules, whether it’s cheese or honey or spirits or whatever,” says Monique Huston, vice president of spirits portfolio at Winebow, an importer and distributor of wines and spirits. “Nicolas just kind of went anti-French.”
Palazzi was born and raised in Bordeaux, where familiarity with fine wines and brandy is all but mandatory. His mother’s family makes wine with their small business in Côtes de Bourg, and one of his grandfather’s closest friends was a well-regarded Cognac distiller. “At Sunday family lunches at my grandparents’ house,” Palazzi recalls, “we’d finish with Cognac made by this gentleman.” Palazzi wasn’t immediately drawn to the world of beverages. He left home to study engineering, and, after engineering school, worked several years as an environmental engineer for the French national electric utility company EDF. When a friend invited him to visit New York City, his life took a new trajectory. He left his unsatisfying job, moved across the Atlantic to join his friend (now his wife and mother to their two children), and found a new job managing a medical research lab. He had a respectable technical career but still didn’t feel content, and he eventually realized that he should build a life around something he actually cared about. “I would get up in the morning and just feel upset for no reason,” he says. “It wasn’t healthy.”
He considered his options. “My basic thoughts were, what are the things that I genuinely like to do?” he says. “And I liked wine and spirits.”
His interest led him first to hanging out, then working on weekends at Jean-Luc Le Du’s boutique wine shop in Manhattan’s West Village. He sharpened his knowledge of wine through seminars, blind-tasting groups, and connections with the sommeliers who patronized the shop.
New York impressed him with its wide diversity of available wines, especially compared to Bordeaux. He was particularly drawn to the bottles from smaller, family-run vineyards. But he found the spirits shelves lacked that depth and were dominated by larger, corporate brands. Palazzi’s instincts told him that New York would welcome curated, lesser-known spirits. So he quit his laboratory job and took his first, tentative steps into the beverage-importing business.
The standard advice for building a successful business is this: Identify demand in a market, then satisfy it. Palazzi didn’t follow that approach. His business model, if it can be called that, was to seek out spirits he liked—made as naturally and with as little intervention as possible—and then strike an import deal with the producer. Put the bottles on the store shelves, and assume fellow lovers of spirits would eventually find and buy them. While his plan was vague at best, he did have a short list of contacts, ranging from producers he knew in France to buyers he’d met at Le Du’s wine shop.
Palazzi flew home to France and visited his grandfather’s friend, the Cognac maker, who became a mentor. “His operation was super tiny, just one dude, but he was real artisanal and really good at what he did,” he said. “I approached him and said, ‘I like spirits. And I’m thinking that I would like to do something around it, and I don’t know anything about it, really.’”
With his mentor’s advice and introductions to a few other distillers, Palazzi launched PM Spirits, named to honor his father, Paul-Marie Palazzi. His first import was Guillon-Painturaud Hors d’Age, a Grande Champagne Cognac, provided by his family’s friend. Back in New York, he took to the streets with bottles in a bag, talking with restaurateurs and liquor shop owners one at a time, hoping to convince them to stock his product. One agreed, then another, and in time he sought out other spirits worthy of attention, including his second import, a Cognac from the house of Paul Beau.
He learned the mechanics of importing the hard way: by screwing up. He underpriced bottles and sold them at a loss. He bought inventory without understanding cash flow. He learned about duties, invoices, and the peculiar financial limbo in which an importer pays suppliers and the government long before customers pay him. “I’ve done a lot of things that did not work out,” he says. “But none of them were fatal.”
A central problem was finding someone to distribute these obscure bottles—a common lament among smaller importers. So Palazzi did what became a recurring feature of his career: When the conventional system didn’t work for him, he worked around it. He began distributing his own spirits in New York, selling bottles himself. To this day, PM Spirits consists of two businesses: a New York wholesale operation, in which his company self-distributes the products in the state, and an importing business that supplies distributors throughout much of the rest of the nation. (Palazzi and his family moved from Brooklyn to Miami in 2019.)
Bit by bit, drinkers started to pay attention. Palazzi returned to France and discovered Armagnacs and Calvados that he thought worthy of attention, and began importing those as well.
He visits each distillery to assure himself that it’s managed by artisans, not accountants. “We meet the people—we need to be like-minded individuals,” Palazzi says. It’s telling that his online directory of imported products often features pictures of the producers, not shots of stills or barrel houses. “It’s meaningful,” says Kate Perry, U.S. market manager for La Maison & Velier, who met Palazzi in 2014 and has partnered with him in importing and marketing his spirits in the U.S. “They’re real—real farmers, real people, real communities. A very personal thing, which is not often the case with spirits brands.”
His explorations have taken him far beyond French brandies, and his portfolio has expanded to include whiskies, rums, agave spirits, eau de vie, and liqueur—all ticking the boxes Palazzi has set out, foremost among them being that he likes drinking them. Palazzi has also partnered with likeminded others in collaborative ventures. “We see if we can work together and do something that’s cool and tastes very good, and that I can afford,” Palazzi says.
Perhaps the best known of his “collabs” is the partnership with Equipo Navazos, a boutique sherry producer in Spain. Palazzi came across this sherry at a wine dinner organized by Levi Dalton in New York, and later toured Spanish bodegas with co-founders Eduardo Ojeda and Jesus Barquin. Ojeda and Barquin took an approach to sherry similar to that embraced by Palazzi: find and market excellent, distinctive sherries crafted by independent producers.
The trio soon partnered on a line of spirits, starting with Spanish brandy that had been aged in sherry casks in hot, dry Spain—a process that transformed a middling brandy into something worthy of a snifter. They later applied the same method to other spirits, including gin, Spanish whiskey, and rum, all sold under the Navazos-Palazzi label. Their rum in particular attracted fans. A Caribbean rum aged five years in ex-bourbon casks and then further in oloroso sherry barrels for more than a decade, it was praised by critics for its notes of quince, walnut, and caramelized roasted meat. In one review, the taster concluded that the rum evokes a full, festive meal in a glass. Palazzi has also released his own branded line of PM Spirits, which includes Cobrafire, launched in 2016. It’s an unaged Armagnac, produced with Domaine d’Espérance, sold as an eau de vie de raisin.
A “drink less, drink better” ethos has spread in recent years, as spirits fans consume less but are willing to spend more on higher-caliber bottles. In some ways, the buying public has caught up with Palazzi, who has become an inadvertent avatar of this movement. There is something almost stubbornly old-fashioned about his approach. It’s not exactly a recipe for building a mass market. But that’s never really been the point. “I don’t have any marketing money,” Palazzi says with a shrug. Finding great spirits is easy, he says. Getting people to try them (and, importantly, buy them) is much harder. “So the only thing that I can do is put a product on the market that looks cool and tastes very good, then try and convince people it’s worth their attention and their money.”
“I think it’s gotten to the point that putting the PM Spirits stamp on something says Nick has tasted this,” says Huston, “and that means it’s really good quality. Maybe his audience is 50 people.” And she appreciates that Palazzi’s approach is essentially: “How about I bring this beautiful thing in for those 50 people?”
