
How did you get started as an entrepreneur in the wine business?
I loved wine, my wife and I both did. We went to wine country all the time throughout California and certainly were not experts at that time, but we knew a fair amount about it. And we came across this idea of, could we open up a winery that was not attached to vineyards? Neither one of us were interested in the agriculture side of the business whatsoever. I started to research how can I bring in raw product to be able to make wine from it—essentially the crushed grapes. Then my second question was, can I figure out how to make this scalable and teachable to where it could become a franchise? Those were my two objectives starting out from day one, and it took us up until 2012 to answer both of those questions with a positive, affirmative yes, we can do that.