Going into this past week we’d heard a lot of good things about Paso Robles and the wine industry in the central coast in general. I spent some time in Santa Barabara so when Matt started telling me how friendly a work environment it would be to work with wineries from the region, I was not surprised. I’ve had a few people tell me that the central coast reminds them quite a bit of living in the midwest because the people are friendly and everyone knows everyone. It’s certainly not what people picture when they think of California, farm land and small towns although the beach is as beautiful as any I’ve ever seen.

Aside from generally liking the peole I also heard a lot of great things about the wine that they are producing. Plenty of people are familar with Turley, but there are plenty of other producers putting out truly exceptional wine.

In many ways this is an area we’ll look to work with more in the future. We don’t want to simply be sending monthly wine shipments that people can get in their local wine store, so featuring some outstanding wineries from the central coast, some of which don’t even work with a distributor, is going to be a very good thing for our clients as well as the wineries themselves.

I took most of the day off today, save this blog to spend some time with my wonderful wife who(as a school counselor) returns to work first thing in the morning. Not only willl she miss being able to sleep in past six thirty, I’ll miss being able to see her during the day.

That being said, I’m extremely excited to start really, really pushing to get Uncorked Ventures up and off the ground in a timely and stable manner.

I’ve had a few more interactions with wine owners over the past few days and everything continues to be a complete positive experience. It also has reminded me that not all of my real estate background is going to go to waste in the wine industry. For example, I have spoken with Doug McCrea from McCrea cellars, the Washington winery I’d previously mentioned. He has talked about a couple of things I find especially interesting that I’ll come back to in later entries:

1) The location listed on the bottle is where the wine was bottled, not where the grapes are grown. In some areas this isn’t that important because climates are consistent(think Tuscany Italy) but if you’re paying for Napa grapes….you should be getting Napa grapes and not Victorville grapes.

2) The national wine publications don’t give enough respect to west coast wineries outside of northern California. I would say the quality of the Napa/Sonoma region surpasses what you find anywhere in the world outside of Bordeaux, however there are plenty of other wineries that provide an outstanding product. I wish I had an old copy of the Robert Parker map that I saw in a Santa Barbara wine store, but the picture of the west coast showing the wine making regions showed California only between Napa and Santa Barbara. To me I do see a sense of that type of thinking, I think having a couple of people working to start a wine club who haven’t been brought up in the industry should allow us to look at certain underappreciated labels with fresh eyes.

For example I know my business partner Matt has been very happy with the quality of wines offered in Paso Robles on the central coast. Finding areas that are producing consistent, what he considers 90+ point wines across different varietals and bottlers is not common.

We’re looking forward to working with great winemakers that produce consistently great product…..that might just not have gotten the right breaks to really expand their business yet.

What’s on tap for me? You should be able to “hear” this blog via podcast in the very near future.

Thanks for your time and please join or Interest List, or Become a Fan on Facebook.

A couple of facts for you to start:

1) Our interest list is growing.
2) Our outreach to wineries is going exceedingly well.

Add those two up and you’d think we’d be pretty darn happy with ourselves, right? Kind of yeah.

Truthfully though having a response from wineries which has frankly exceeded our wildest dreams has started to apply the pressure to grow our interest list and to provide these great wines to the public is growing.

When we first got started I thought that I would have a couple of months to work on search engine placement and set up other means of obtaining our initial business. Given the level of interest by pretty much every winery we’ve spoken with though I’m feeling the pressure to start producing real paying customers. We realize the wine club business is competitive and we only get one shot to provide great wine to customers. We had thought finding top notch wine at the right price would be the difficult part, that hasn’t been the case thus far. Our interest list is larger then we had initially thought we’d have at this stage-but we never thought we’d have access to such a great product so early in our club.

Overall it is a good thing, yesterday was a good day on the search engine front. We’ve officially moved Uncorked Ventures from a Google page rank N/A…..all the way to a Google page rank of 0. Doesn’t sound like much to the wine connoisseur reading this blog, but the Google page rank system effectively functions like the Richter scale for earthquakes….a 1 is actually 10 times bigger then a 0 which is 10 times greater then a N/A.

I’ve have a number of other things to finish up on the website front this morning: Adding more accurate Title tags to each page, adding Meta tags(in case they still matter to Yahoo and Bing, yes I know Google doesn’t care) and setting up this wonderful blog(as well as my business partners) so that each entry is actually its own page.

As always we hope you’ll join us over at Uncorked Ventures and sign up for our interest list. We’re debating when the appropiate time to announce our first group of wineries is, although we realize this will help our interest list grow and give us a much larger level of respectability….we don’t want to jump the gun and announce too soon.

We’re very much looking forward to our September shipment. I feel like this is really our time. Putting the long hours now will lead to the type of business I’ve always wanted to be a part of.

Almost forgot to add, I have a Sterling Reserve 2004 Cab waiting for me later….that should be the best part of the day!

In my last post I started to talk about a group of wineries that I’d love to work with in regard to our high end wine club and also our wine export services to Central and South America. Needless to say these are some of the great names in the wine industry and although I am sure they are approached by different wine clubs often, I think our export services may give us an advantage that others lack.

Maybe its just Sunday morning talking as I sit here with a cup of coffee and the golden retriever that I’m dog sitting sitting on my feet, but I think we can add significant value to these wineries by opening up markets that they do not currently have a significant presence in, or really any presence at all.

I’m asked by friends and family which one winery would you love to work with? It’s not really possible to answer that question so much of the answer is going to come from the personal relationship side of things in addition to the actual wine, but from the wine perspective there are probably 50-75 wineries that are based in California, Oregon and Washington that would all be close to the top of my list. I won’t differentiate between those wineries in this space, at least not at this time.

The winery that I wanted to give some background on first here is Alpha Omega Winery. It’s located in the Rutherford part of Napa and includes more then a few historic vineyards.

Why would I love to work with Alpha Omega? I have a ton of respect for the business decisions that they have made. I think all businesses struggle to find the correct ratio between profit taking, investing in their product and providing value to their customers. Alpha Omega took an incredible step when they hired Michel Rolland starting for their vintage back in 2006. For those of you who don’t know who Michel Rolland is, here is a little background along with his photo:

He’s from a famous French winemaking family.
Is a Bordeaux based oenologist
Is the foremost wine consultant in the world
Favors technological advancements to improve wine(good for him!)
Probably the most influencial winemaker in the world
Owns a couple French vineyards
Consults with over 100 truly high end wineries

I found what I consider a great quote from the man himself:

“What I bring is a range of experience and a span of reference that other people here, however talented they might be, do not have…A consultant cannot know everything. I am here to give advice with an open mind to the resident winemaker. So the personality of the people is an essential. It’s fundamental. If you have no contact with the people, it’s impossible. I’m no magician.”

Quite frankly what I see in Alpha Omega is a winery which is completely committed to providing its customers the absolute best wine that it can produce. Hiring Rolland shows how committed they truly are because I’m sure his consulting services are not inexpensive. Given his quote above I would think that Alpha Omega’s resident winemaker Jean Hoefliger (see photo below) would be an interesting person to speak with.

Aside from what sounds like an interesting life experience(born in Switzerland having lived in South Africa and France for some time) I’m always impressed by people who are comfortable in their jobs and are able to bring in the best talent possible to help them along the way, I know from limited experience this isn’t always the easiest decision to make.

Oh yeah-the final and most important reason why I’d love to work with Alpha Omega. They make great wine that is even improving. We’ve liked their products for a while and now Robert Parker is starting to agree giving them a score as high as 94 on one bottle.

At one point in the book (page45 actually) Moltz says the following:

“Three years later, we were bidding for a customer project that would add 20 percent to our revenue growth. They wanted to come visit our warehouse to see if we were large and efficient enough to handle thier capacity. I remember that I instructed our warehouse staff to assemble empty boxes and label them as product and put them on our bare shelves. This was to make it seem like we had more product in our warehouse then we actually had. They were impressed and we got the business!”

Although I’m not necessarily opposed to making our wine club seem larger then it actually is at some point, at this point in time with the internet and the amount of public information available I can’t imagine a stunt like this working in the wine business.

By writing this blog(combined with my business partner Matt’s blog) I’m giving everyone a realistic look inside our start up.

Yes, we’re asking customers and wineries to take a small leap of faith with us at the beginning. We do hope that this blog and our other interaction features lets companies, their decision makers and also customers get to know us a little bit. Hopefully after reading about us both groups of people are willing to take a meeting with us, make us an offer or start doing business.

All of this comes to mind because we’re moving forward with everything in regards to the business. Our website should be up at the beginning of next week, we had a couple views of our Facebook profile(even though it isn’t nearly complete) and we’re starting to speak with wineries about potential partnerships.

As always with negotiations it’s an interesting process. Wineries know generally what we’re looking for: wines at some sort of a discount, or at least the availability of otherwise unavailable wine. If we’re all going to be honest about it we realize that a winery making 200 cases isn’t going to be giving us many cases, let alone a significant discount. However a winery that is making 50,000 cases or more and doesn’t sell them all, should be more willing to at least discuss a lower price point.

So who are we anxious to work with?

At the beginning we felt that utilizing our connections in Central and South America to export wine would allow us entry to some of the true high end wine available in California. These wineries would form the basis for our premium wine club as well as an outstanding group to choose from when exporting to restaurants and other distributors south of the border.

I haven’t yet spent a lot of time here discussing some of the wineries that I’d love to have available for our premium wine club as well as well as our first export shipments: A very short list of which I’ll spend some time on each winery later on would have to include: Dumol, Alpha Omega, O’Shaghnessy, Turley, Ridge, Saxum and K Vintners.