Subject: Orangewood Wines Newsletter - Volume 3, Issue 21 – August 27, 2008

Sent: Wednesday August 27, 2008 9:23 PM

Introduction

It is nearly the end of August, the monsoon is in full swing (an inch of rain here a couple of days ago), school is in for fall (to paraphrase our local rocker Alice Cooper) and all we need are some nights when it drops below 80 degrees.  It seems that a number of our customers are anxious to schedule tastings or wine dinners, so I will be asking our winery owners and winemakers to look at their calendars to see when they would like to visit sunny Arizona.

Separately, we have scheduled our annual wine tasting for the afternoon of Sunday, September 28th.  As in the past, we are doing this in combination with three other distributors.  We will be inviting representatives from the wineries we started representing recently, and will have a representative selection of wines from each of our wineries.

Box Score

New Restaurants:                        5

New Retail/Wine Bar Outlets:       2

New Wineries                              2

New Sales People                       1

Contents

New Restaurants

New Wine Stores/Wine Bars

New Wineries

New Sales Person

Rambling

New Restaurants

Amano

1541 East Baseline Road,

Phoenix, AZ, 85042.

(602) 305-9466

 

Jax Kitchen

7286 North Oracle Road
Tucson, AZ 85704

(520) 219-1235

 

Romeo’s Euro Café 

207 North Gilbert Road
Gilbert, AZ 85234

(480) 962-4224

 

Wally’s American Pub N Grill

5029 North 44th Street
Phoenix, AZ 85018

(602) 954-2040

 

O’Donoghue’s Irish Pub

20469 North Hayden Road
Scottsdale, AZ 85255

(928) 443-8848

New Wine Stores/Wine Bars

AJ’s Fine Foods

18271 North Pima Road

Scottsdale, AZ 85255

Opening soon

 

Cellars Fine Wine and Spirits

914 East Camelback Road
Phoenix, AZ 85014

(602) 265-9463‎

New Wineries

Kym Jenke grew up at the family farm in the Barossa Valley, Australia.  (You know where this is going to finish up - yes he is the owner and winemaker for Jenke Vineyards.)  Kym went to school in California where he met Jeff Schaeffer, who became a good friend.  This year Jeff also became his importer and USA distributor for Jenke Wines.  After school Kym made wine in Napa Valley for a while before heading for home.  Recently he met up with Jeff in Arizona and, after a long day, they finished up in Cave Creek with Laurie and me drinking beer and the remnants of their now somewhat warm wine.  One key to selling wine is a strong relationship with the supplier.  Such a relationship was started that evening.  None the less, our process says that I need to have the sales team try the wine and agree that we have something sellable.  That happened a couple weeks later.  Even the skeptics liked these wines. 

      Many of us in Orangewood Wines love Italian wines.  Some of us have either tried to sell to Italian Ristorante or have requests for an Italian wine that will fit on a non-Italian wine list.  Steve Noble has been selling wine for us for the last 6 months and he remembered running into Matthew Fioretti in Sonoma.  Matthew, an American living in Piedmont, started and owns the Importer Summa Vitis.  Their primarily Italian portfolio was distributed in Arizona by the now defunct (it’s OK to say this in polite society) distributor, Ponti.  The portfolio contains only family owned wineries with small productions.  That sounded familiar.  So we have tasted quite few of these wines and have included some of them on our regular price list.  The remainder of the portfolio is also available to those with fond memories of the Ponti offerings.

New Sales Person

Sherri Wilson

Sherri has been in the Food and Beverage industry for some time, including representing an Arizona winery at events around the state.  She is enthusiastic about wine and once considered buying a winery.  She lives in Gilbert, which is a long way from where the rest of us live, but it is becoming closer to the center of Phoenix every day.   Sherri’s initial territory includes Gilbert and Queen Creek.

 

Rambling

As we look at the 16,000 liquor licenses that have been issued in Arizona, we try to home in on the places that are what we call “wine serious”.  We represent small wineries so they have little name recognition and require some hand selling.  We try to get our customers excited about one or more of the wines we supply so that they buy some.

The next step is to work with our customers to help them sell the wines to their customers.  One way of doing that is to hold wine tastings of one form or another.  Perhaps it’s a special for the night, perhaps one night there is a flight available at a reasonable price, a wine dinner; there are a number of variations.  For the restaurateur this allows customers to try wines that perhaps they would not risk trying, and if it works adds one or more wines to the consumers list of wines they are comfortable ordering in the future.  For us, the distributor, this gives us a chance to help the restaurateur, train their staff and get the consumers excited too, so that the wine is added to the wine list on a permanent basis.

That’s the theory and, in practice, it works like this most of the time.  I have noticed that some of our customers think we are free servers and have us running around delivering food, while their regular servers are given the night off.  Such a set up misses the point.  Our goal is to train those servers and also have time to talk to the customers and provide a wine focus not normally available. 

           

The Rambler rambles on…

 

From all of us at Orangewood Wines,

 

 

Richard (newsletter writer) and Laurie (editor)

Orangewood Wines