With your help...
Tiny Vineyards may be coming to a wine shop or restaurant near you!
A wine is ready when you can’t bear to wait for it any longer. – Karen MacNeil,
Finally, we’ve got a distributor!
Every time I’ve had a serious discussion with a distributor I’ve been told we’re too small, we’re too expensive, we’re not expensive enough, we’re too small, we need to commit to more growth, we need to make different varietals, we’re too small, we need to use this bottle weight, that kind of closure, this style of label design, we’re too small, we need to avoid using chemical additions and focus on “natural” wines, we need to make better wine through chemistry and try and make every vintage taste the same. Did I mention, we’re too small?
If only one of them had been forthright enough to tell it like it is, to acknowledge that the wine industry is in the shits, that they had it too good for too long and now it’s time to pay the piper, that over-supply and under-demand has final come home to roost (my apologies, but this is such fertile ground for cliche-riddled idioms!), that market influences like the Boomer generation (which created the wine boom in the first place) aging out and the Gen X’ers who follow being 10% smaller in overall population with no possibility of making up the difference. That social, environmental and health concerns about alcohol have taken hold and beverage preferences in younger buyers are governed by price, transparency, social impact and an ethos of diversity and inclusion, while shape-shifting to minimal intervention, biodynamic natural wines, LoNo (low and no alcohol wine), pét-nats, canned wine, alliance with gender and ethnic diverse winery owners, content transparency and warnings on wine labels, and who knows what additional impact might arise with impending immigration control.
But through it all, grape growers kept planting more grapes, winemakers kept making more wine and distributors kept building the inventories—until suddenly, sometime last year, everyone slammed on the brakes.
So yeah, the one honest thing I was told is that we were too small. Too small to pay attention to when the feeding frenzy was going on, and certainly too small to bother with now that the party’s over. Supplying a traditional wine distribution sales force with the few hundred cases we make each year won’t even pay their expenses.
What’s a small (okay, tiny) winery to do? I love that we offer what the industry calls a “DTC” (Direct to Consumer) approach to wine sales fulfillment. Buyers appreciate the wine being delivered direct to their home or office, and if they buy enough we can usually cover the cost of shipping, and even offer discounts on larger purchases. But there’s no way to sell anyone just a bottle or two without having to charge them a shipping fee that is often more than the wine itself. And then they have to wait days for it to be delivered. Not a whole lot of incentive there. And it really puts the kibosh on word-of-mouth grass roots marketing where someone who reads or hears something good about a wine can buy a bottle immediately to see if they like it.
So, how do we spread the word about Tiny Vineyards Wine Company and grow? How can a new buyer discover and enjoy a bottle of our wine in a restaurant and then become a regular buyer at their local wine shop, or online at at our website? And how did our wines show up in that restaurant in the first place, or that wine shop. Under the archaic (since the days of Prohibition!) and often repressive (as compared to just about any other type of product distribution) laws of alcohol distribution, in almost every state a winery needs to interact with a distributor in order to get access to a restaurant or wine shop. It’s called the “three tier system.”
So how the hell do we get that distributor if we’re forever going to be dismissed as too small? You feel my frustration? Beleaguered by this impediment for months—even longer—one day by chance (divine intervention?) I read about about an educational seminar being offered at the North Coast Wine Industry Expo. It was entitled, Distributor Relations: Controlling Your Wines Destiny, and it featured a traditional distributor, a wine sales and marketing consultant, an industry data aggregator, and a woman named Cheryl Durzy, who had worked in the trenches of her family’s winery and handled their distribution.
As you might suspect, I went to the seminar with a big chip on my shoulder. I had half a notion to download on the panel giving what I expected would be party-line presentations. The consultant acted as moderator, the data guy ran into travel delays and never showed up, and the traditional distributor—much to his credit— gave an unvarnished overview of the state of the industry echoing much of my rant above. But Ms Durzy was worth the price of admission—many, many, many times over!
She had founded and developed an untraditional, technology-driven distribution model. A non-bricks-and-mortar, digitally enhanced, progressive approach that could provide the backend for order taking and fulfillment, revenue collection and state-by-state compliance, and yet was astute enough to leave the actual selling to the folks who know the wine the best—the people who made it.
She really did invent a better mousetrap. She named it LibDib.com (I’m still puzzling on that?). It is up and running—has been for seven years—and it is open and available to any winery who truly wants to “control their own destiny.”
Ms Durzy’s concept is really quite simple, and that’s what makes it brilliant. Think of it like at “Etsy of wine distribution” with all the sellers being wine producers like me, and all the buyers being restaurants, bottle shops, liquor stores, grocery chains—anyplace that wine has historically been sold. It doesn’t function yet in every state due to those antediluvian liquor laws, but LibDib is now being utilized legally by over 30,000 wine retailers in 16 states (California, Colorado, Florida, New York, Georgia, Illinois, Texas, New Jersey, Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Washington DC, and more to come) which service 70% of the U.S. population. That California and Colorado are our two biggest markets—and are two of the states LibDib originally started in and now have the most outreach—kinda makes it a no-brainer for Tiny Vineyard Wine Company!
How you can help. Please really do this!
It’s so simple. If you live in any of the states listed above just shoot me an email at wildfly.jed@gmail.com and give me the name of your favorite restaurant, and/or wine shop where it would be great for you to be able to buy a bottle or two of our wine whenever you wanted. And if by chance you have a personal relationship with the owner or someone there with buying authority, please put in a good word for us and let me know who to contact. I’ll do the rest.
With gratitude and thanks!