Big Business Takeover
When I started my venture in the wine industry, I was importing and wholesaling wines from France and Spain. I stuck to what I knew best, which was Rosé, and let my great sales skills do the rest. Entering wine shops in high-visibility tradie gear while carrying pink rosé bottles was an instant hit. I mean, who wouldn't want to buy wine from me?
This led to me meeting some incredibly talented and experienced people, not only from the Yarra Valley but from all over, opening my eyes to rare unicorn wines (yes, unicorns are real) and the ins and outs of an ever-changing industry.
After 14 months of hard work and dedication, which included lugging boxes and affixing 5500 labels to each bottle when they arrived in Australia, big business stepped in without our knowledge. Big, bustling DM's (I'll keep their name a secret) went to the winemaker and took the wine from us. It went from being a premium wine with a great following, stocked in independent stores and selling at a rapid pace, to a standard bottle on a large wall of wines, crushing my dreams of making the wholesale/importer dream a reality at that stage of my life.
All of this happened amid the worldwide crisis we called Covid-19, shifting my focus from large-scale to smaller-scale wine sales, with a focus on the Yarra Valley and unicorn wines. I created a wine club that aims to remove the stigma of high-priced wines and hopefully makes it less confusing and easier to navigate.
Big businesses exist for a reason, to provide motivation for the little guy to succeed. Every chance I get to support small businesses, I will, because at the end of the day, I am small. I am a family man with three little ones to raise and support. Everything I do on this journey is for them. Business comes and goes, but family stays forever.
Wine Animal Out.