The #1 Opportunity in the Wine Industry

In this episode of the GaryVee Audio Experience, I sit down with Master Sommelier Carlo Santos and Angus Locklin on the Got Somme Wine podcast to talk about what I think is thebiggest opportunity in the world right now: there's too much wine being made against the demand, and the buyer has the power, not the producers. I encourage you to do some real homework to find the aggressive discounters, because there's deals running around that are crazy. I also share my 35-year wine journey from the counter of my father's liquor store, whyblind tasting is so humbling, and how monthly wine dinners became a very big part of my business life. You'll learn about: • Why It's A Buyer's Market • How To Find Aggressive Discounters • Using Wine To Build Business Relationships • Why No One Knows Everything • How Wine Styles Found Their Balance • Building And Selling Empathy Wines

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Welcome back to Got Som Wine Podcast with the master sommelier Carlos Santos and a regular pleb Angus O'Loughlin. And I feel like a real pleb in an audience with these two. Two people with rich histories in wine and just me with an unsophisticated palate willing to learn. Gary Vee, welcome to the podcast. For those who, you know, don't know who you are, what is your relationship with wine?

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, man, thank you for having me. My relationship with wine is that I am now 50 years old and 35 years ago, I picked up The Wine Spectator and Stephen Tander's International Wine Cellar and The Wine Spectator and started reading about wine at the register encounter of my father's liquor store and realized somewhere in that time between 14 and 16 years old, growing up in a local family liquor store business, that people collected wine and that wine had ratings like 91 and 92 and 93 points.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  And I was a avid trading card, comic book, sports, collectibles kid as a very young boy, 11, 12, 13 years old, making a buck as an immigrant in the US at shows and flea markets. And the thought that people collected wine was so intoxicating to me because I wanted to help my family business, but I was not interested in selling, you know, beer and vodka. But this wine thing felt elevated, felt collectible, felt communal. And for the last 35 years, it's been a very big part of my life. From 16 to 35, it was my obsession.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I would say that for those 20 years of my life, up until I was 21, from 16 to 21, those five years was a astonishing amount of reading. Less as our distinguished partner here for trying to be a master sommelier or a sommelier, like I didn't desperately need to know, you know, every region or every type, but more from a commercial standpoint, you know, whereas later in my career, I did get excited about the subregions within Burgundy or Alsace or the Loire. The first decade was really, I just wanted to know what every consumer wanted, whether it was as silly as Yellow Tail or Kendall Jackson from a supermarket

• 2:30Speaker 02

  standpoint, all the way to single vineyard, Gigal, Coeur Rotez, or First Growth Bordeauxs, or Penfolds Grange, or, you know, Napa Valley Colt wines. And then at 34 years old, 16 years ago, I started another business with my brother. I kind of left the day to day running of the wine business. I did a lot of innovating. I launched one of the first e-commerce wine businesses in America in 96. I built one of the largest wine retail stores in the country for my father. I really hit the scene, maybe when you guys both saw me with wine videos in the early 2000s on YouTube and, you know, started to have real credibility,

• 3:12Speaker 02

  no different than James Holiday or Robert Parker or Francis Robinson as a wine critic for, from 2006 through 2011. And then at the height of it, I kind of pivoted my career and went into being a Silicon Valley investor and a marketing and business personal brand and running a lot of businesses. And that actually is when my wine journey got even more interesting, I would argue. Maybe not for everybody listening, but for me personally. From 2011, when I left day to day, and when I say day to day, this morning, I wrote the copy to winetex.com, a, you know, a sales engine for my family business. So I've actually

• 3:55Speaker 02

  never have left the business. Like this morning, I read the detailed reports of what's sold in the store. And my best friend, Brandon, in essence, runs the business for my father and I. And he's my best friend. I talk to him every day. So I'm still very close to the business. But in 2011, I left from being the day to day human being that 12 hours a day ran it. And by 2015, four years after that, I started to enjoy wine like a consumer. I was far enough away from day to day that going to a restaurant, looking at a wine list,

• 4:38Speaker 02

  no longer had me thinking about what they paid for it and what the markup was and what the current rating was and what the market thought. It was just a lot of fun. And for the last 10 years, I've been as much of a consumer as I've been an operator or merchant or critic. And that is my wine journey in a nutshell.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  I'm still, I'm still to get to that stage. It's, I think, of course, you enjoy a lot of wine as a, as a, as a consumer. You go out, you have wine socially and stuff. But when you're so involved in, in wine and buying and selling in the restaurant, it's hard to, you are right, it's hard to sometimes sit back and really, really fully enjoy without thinking too much where it comes from, what it is, how much it costs, and how much am I going to sell it for and all that jazz, for sure.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  I don't think, you know, as much as I tried to do that when I was in the eye of the storm, I, in hindsight, when I actually got to that place, it, you can't, you can't detach when it's so part of your true day to day commercially. And that's okay. It was a lot of fun 15 years ago, knowing the winemaker, the process. Like I knew everything. It was, it was, I was like a party trick, you know, you know, this Carlos, like it's kind of cool. You know, there's times where I miss knowing absolutely everything.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  I used to watch all the videos when I was, you know, back in London 15 years ago, I was watching everything. He actually pretty much got me into wine a little bit as well. I mean, my grandfather would make wine and I used to say only two types of wine. One was bad, one was really bad. He was still the best wine, he was still the best wine in the world because sitting alongside him and, you know, tasting wine with him was, was great. But, but, you know, watching the videos when I was back in London was, was pretty, was pretty awesome. And I think it was so raw and so, so pure and so, you know, without, I guess, without the structure of knowledge from any wine school, but just from a passion standpoint, that was, that was, that was what I enjoyed the most about the videos.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Thank you. And what was really fun was in the beginning, a lot of people scrutinized it because it was less pretentious. It was, you know, in general, I have reading comprehension issues. And so I pronounce things in a certain way, oftentimes not the quote unquote proper pronunciation. But what was fun was by the time I started making those videos, I knew wine and I really knew wine, not only from like information, but in blind tastings and things of that nature. And it was more fun being out and about. I remember early on when I was making a lot of noise, if I would go to, the show was getting very big, very popular. And I would go to a restaurant in Manhattan and a lot of sommeliers didn't like what I was doing. They thought I was dumbing down wine and they would try to get

• 7:33Speaker 02

  me, right? I'd be at the table and they would bring a glass over and they'd be like, what do you, what do you think this is? And I could feel, because I'm very intuitive, that they were trying to get me.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's the bad side. I think that's the bad side of, of sometimes wine, that can be a little bit pretentious.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  It was great for me because I gained a lot of credibility. They would stick a wine in front of me. I'm like, this is Barbaresco. And they'd be shocked. They'd be shocked that I knew it was a Rioja or a Shiraz or, and so, but yes, you're right. When I got into wine, I was very young and nobody young was into wine. Because to your point, it was very gate kept. It was very pretentious. And anyone that had any knowledge, instead of trying to bring people on board like I did with you, they tried to talk down to people.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  And I still think people want Carlos to fail as well. Every time we do a blind wine tasting and he gets it wrong, and I love that you're pouring a wine, we'll talk about that in a second. But, you know, people do want to say, look, it's just grapes and alcohol. I mean, nothing changes. This is all just, you know, bullshit and magic tricks. So people still want, you know, Carlos to fail in that same way, whereas there are some people who obviously love it when he gets it right and are more intrigued about it. You've just poured yourself a glass. What have we got here, Gary?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Well, it was funny that you guys, you know, the team was like, hey, the team wants you to have a special wine. Okay, I could have grabbed something that meant something to me. And that's a good story. I could have, you know, the first, I have some bottles of Empathy, a brand I started. There's Verde in my cellar here with the first wine I did on Wine Library TV. That means a lot to me. There's a 94 Brian family in my cave right here. That was the first wine I had on my 21st birthday.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Some big Napa Valles.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  There's some incredible Sancerres and I predominantly drink white wine as a human being. Like, I'm very into Italian whites. In fact, you guys may know this, if you're really nerdy about me, I was always a very substantial advocate of Semyon from Australia. So there was a lot of things I thought about. I grabbed this minor Cabernet, not because I'm so infatuated with it. It's actually a very good wine, but right now I'm not currently drinking a whole lot of Napa Valley cabs. It's, you know, they thank God for my prime that, you know, 10, 15 years ago, they were way over the top. Yeah. Now, you know, since I've left day to day, a lot of the wineries have done what I was yelling about on that show,

• 9:59Speaker 02

  which is like less oak, you know, I think we're in a very nice time in the wine world where a lot of things are finding their true terroir, their true balance. I think it's a beautiful time in the world. I think a lot of that had to do with Robert Parker no longer being the biggest voice and everybody making wine for him. Not that he did anything wrong. It was just that era.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  His style as well, yeah.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  But there's a reason I brought this wine. It's because I wanted to talk to you guys about what I think is the biggest opportunity in the world right now, which is there's too much wine being made.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  True.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Against the demand. And for everyone who's listening, I think this is a very special time where the buyer has the power, not the producers. And for example, this Oracle miner, which is a beautiful wine, is truly a hundred twenty five dollar wine that on Wine Text, we sold for under thirty dollars a bottle. And I'm getting fifteen emails a month. And this is me getting the emails. I'm not even active with the business from people that bought it, that can't believe it and want to thank us. The store's getting even more. And I don't think it's an enigma. I think that it is a preview that I wanted everyone to know because I'm getting all the offers. I'm still very involved in the buying for Wine Library and Wine Text.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  And the insanity coming out of your side of the world from both Australia and New Zealand. And when I say insanity, high caliber pinot from Central Otago, wildly tremendous Chardonnay from Margaret River, Barossa based Shiraz that are normally eighty, a hundred dollar Australian. And you guys have your versions of discounters in your beautiful country. I, I just want everyone to be very thoughtful if they're listening to this podcast to do some real homework, to find the aggressive discounters. Because this is, I've never seen anything like this. There is so much wine compared to demand

• 11:57Speaker 02

  that, and there's tariffs and all the things going on in the U.S. that this is a window of being able to buy remarkable wine for a fraction of the cost. This is bad for the wineries and remarkable for the consumer. And I thought, if I do this podcast, how do I bring value? And I just did. I, I want to challenge everyone who's listening to explore other options to buy wine because there's deals running around that are crazy.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  That's true. Yeah, I think, um, you know, rightfully so, the China tariffs sort of affected a lot of Australia, not being able to get a lot of our wines from particularly South Australia over there when we've got, you know, millions of liters just sitting in steel barrels at the moment going unused. And yes, it is a buyer's market, which is great.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Um, a question for you then, Gary, in that intersect of business and wine. How much does that come into your life as a business person? Do you find yourself doing a lot of your business deals, you know, because you're an international business? You know, do you find yourself doing things face to face? Do you do it at a restaurant with a bottle of wine? Do you celebrate with a champagne? How do you close a deal?

• 13:04Speaker 02

  That's, that's a great question. Yeah, it's a very, it's actually a substantial part of my life, given my background. Champagne's interesting. I'm glad we brought it up. I just mentioned I drink a lot of white wine. I lumped sparkling into that. I have forever, you can go back to the videos, you probably remember this, Carlos. I talked about sparkling wine and not just champagne, cava. You know, by the way, sparkling Shiraz is one of my favorite discoveries.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  I got that with you. I got that with you. Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  It's a very big part of my life. Um, from a business standpoint, you're absolutely right. Like it is subconscious, not even conscious, that I book important meetings at really nice restaurants where wine's a big part of it. Oh, I got a big one for you. I now do a monthly wine dinner where I bring eight to 10 people together of prominence in my world who normally don't like or know, not like, don't know each other. And we drink eight to 10 incredible bottles of wine. I had a Chateau La Fleur Petrus ninety eight Magnum.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Where a CMO of MetLife, the large insurance company, couldn't believe how good it was. And I put the cork in and let him leave with half, a third of the bottle. So it's become a very big part of my business life because I'm hosting these business dinners around premium wine once a month, which has been phenomenal. And then birthdays, anniversaries, business meetings. I mean, wine is a very prominent part of it. And I like going high, low, meaning if I have very bougie people, high net worth people, I like bringing out a fifteen dollar Gavi that I just discovered to show that, stop being pretentious. And then on the flip side,

• 14:43Speaker 02

  if I have like, you know, I just had a meeting with my CTO of V Friends, my Marvel Pokemon brand. He's into wine a little bit, but he buys twenty dollar bottle of wine. For him, I want to bring a five hundred dollar, you know, red label Bruno Giacosa, single Verne Barolo for him to be like, what is this? And I'm like, I'm sorry, I've boomed your life now. You'll never see twenty dollar wine.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  You'll never get a twenty again.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  So I play a lot of games in a positive way like that with wine.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  No, that's awesome. And those wine dinners all ticketed events or people that you invite or?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Literally in this, literally I'll shift like in this little dining room I'm in, I just friends. It's very, you know, I realized I was missing wine. That, that's a really fun topic to talk about. About a year ago, two years ago, I'm like, I miss wine dinners. When I was selling, I would get ten clients together who didn't know each other. Brown paper bag blind.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  And they would have a blast. They would make new friends because of me. They would become deeper relationships, so they became better customers. And most of all, I was able to prove what I cared about, which was when they would discover new wineries that did not get ninety five points, Parker, were not Opus One or Chateau Margaux. And so I was expanding their palates.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  I was creating deeper relationships. And so I brought it now to my marketing and investing world, and it's been a blast. Obviously, you know, high net worth individuals, half of them are already into wine. The others are kind of curious or it's been really, really fun. And it's been a new last two years thing and I'm doing more of it.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  That setting where you are looks like the original, where the, the, the wine videos came from.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. There was those dinners. I, it was such a seed of why I did the videos. And I used to do brown bags on the videos, as you know. When you take away knowing, you know, back to, I guess what you said about Carlos, like, you know, what Carlos and I know and what even masters sommelier, I mean, I've spent time with masters of wine who can get something wrong blind. It's so humbling.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  No one, no one knows everything. I think that's what people don't understand is that we are still human and.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  We blind tasted a white Merlot yesterday.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Oh, Bianco, Bianco di Merlot was amazing. Was really fun. And this is one of those discoveries that I'm not sure how much that bottle costs, but like it's, it's incredibly amazing to try something that you have never tried and that you get into blind tasting and you just absolutely don't know where to go at all. And as you say, it's humbling and you know, you've got to be honest with yourself as well. It's like no one ever knows everything. It's impossible. Like the wine is growing so fast and.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Well, the other thing that's going on with wine for everybody who's listening, why it's so humbling is I've seen and I've, it's happened to me and I'm sure Carlos is, this is very nerdy, but it will make sense to you.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  You have winemakers that come along that do things stylistically different. So I'll taste something and I'll be like, blah, blah, blah, you know, um, um, Crows Hermitage from the, and, and then you're like, what? It's some Spanish wine. And then what you realize is you were actually more right than your friends would think because stylistically you were tasting the pepper and the, but, but a winemaker's, they're playing, they're, they're innovating, they're trying new things. I mean, and you know this, Carlos, like one of my favorite things to do when I got really educated, I would bring things to blind tastings that no one would be able to figure out because I knew I had this Australian winemaker making Pinot Noir, you know, from Adelaide that tasted like red burgundy because he was doing this thing.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  And that was a way for me to show people to not just like blindly look at the label or the rating. And so sometimes you're right and you're wildly wrong because a winemaker was doing something very incredibly innovative.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  One of the best examples you can ever put out there is Rioja, you know, Reserva, Grand Reserva, you know, with French oak. You know, like that completely throws you off because you're expecting American oak, that big sweet coconut bomb. And then it becomes, you know, savory and more, you know, perhaps more elegant and and finer where, where you think you're drinking a Bordeaux, you know, so it completely.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  In fact, because I'm going to make it contextual to Down Under, I was there when Dan Phillips really exploded in late nineties and started importing a very stylistically different Australian wine. I mean, when I was growing up with Penfolds Grange and Henchkey Hill of Grace as like the gold standard. And here came in the late nineties, Dan Phillips with Wild Duck Muck.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  And, and all these wild wines. And I remember I loved them because I was young in my career. And that was the time, much like young people in general, especially young Americans, you like everything bombastic, right? And so you had these wines coming, Burge family, like he was bringing these incredibly over the top wines. And I fell in love with them. I was promoting them. And then one of the signature moments of my career, for four or five months, I'm selling these wines to people that were buying Colt Napa cabs and they were loving them. You know, they were buying ninety dollar Colt cabs and I was giving them twenty dollar Australian wines that they loved. And now Robert Parker came out and gave all these wines ninety eight, ninety, I mean, he's, when no, nothing got higher than ninety five.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  These numbers were blew, blew everyone away with the scores. And it kind of made me American famous amongst collectors because I was peddling it before anyone knew what it was. And I had most of the allocation in America. And so there's just these fun moments of like styles and different things. And none of those Australian wines tasted anything like the gold standard from Australia in the eighties and nineties. And then it became too much and people really hated the style. It was almost like eating cake at every meal. You eventually don't like it.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  And now, when I drink Australian wines, it's very clear to me that, similar to Napa, it's found its equilibrium. And there's a nice balance, even in Barossa, that is known for bigger wines. I sense so much more balance, and that's been very enjoyable.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  You know, everything comes and goes in fashions, right? You know, Shiraz, Shiraz has gone a little bit out of fashion, big Cabernet, et cetera, which you absolutely right. I think years ago, there was, you know, everyone was drinking them. Obviously, price was super, super high. And now, I think to your point, like, you know, you can find bargains now. But I think Australia is somehow coming back to, for example, you know, let's say Chardonnay, where at some stage, no one wanted to drink big, buttery, oaky Chardonnays. Now, suddenly, slowly, they start coming back.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Happened with me in a big way, post me leaving wine. I was gonna bring it up. I'm glad, that's amazing you brought it up. I was unaware that there's a trend to the buttery oaky. I was there, I was there in a real way. It was funny, Brandon, again, who I just mentioned, my best friend who runs a business, was making fun of me when I left. I mean, you can watch all 1,000 episodes of Wine Library TV, all of them. And 99% of the time, I was bashing on buttery oaky Chardonnays. Two years after I stopped doing the show, I gravitated to those wines heavily. I was eating a lot of fish.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  And I love crisp. Like, I was drinking plenty of Sancerre and Chablis, long before they got "hot", quote unquote. But my palate, for like, a year or two, went to the extremes. I wanted Rambauer Chardonnay, I wanted Kistler, I wanted oak, butter oak, because I didn't care about the judgment. I just was going with what my palate was yearning for.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, fair enough. And I think that's how it should be. And I feel like, yeah, people is coming back to that again. And suddenly, it became quite hard to recommend, you know, a young vintage of something that is really buttery, creamy and oaky, you know? Because everyone has just gone completely the other way. But they are coming back, which is good.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is good. I mean, especially, I also think they're more delicious. I think they're not as nerdy and not as cool for people like us. But I do think for the general population, they are more delicious.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  It brings more people, I think it's a style that brings more people into wine, for sure. Because they're rounder, they're warmer, they're more sort of generous. The fruit scents of kind of almost sweetness. It's dry, offered to dry, but the fruit ripeness, bringing that sweetness character, I think it brings a lot more people to wine than not. Probably than something too austere, like a Chablis, you know, occasionally.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Speaking of a renaissance, you've been calling this for years, Gary, but collectibles, they're back. I mean, of course, you've got the NFTs, the new version of them. But of course, basketball cards, baseball cards, Pokemon cards. I sold my Char, as I back that pre-COVID, which is very disappointing, my base set. But do you think wine will enter, have its own era? You know, a lot of people holding on to old wines. I see, and I'm starting to see, sort of, you know, younger generations drinking less, therefore, that passed on seller not meaning so much when grandpa or father passes away, and maybe they start to hit the markets. Do you think there'll be a collector's edition of the wine industry in the next 10 years?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I do. And let me tell you why, because of the blockchain. So I know NFT is a dirty word now, because there was a lot of greed. And it kind of was similar to what I saw with internet stock in 2000. You know, the bubble, the Web 1.0 bubble. But let me, give me an example. Penfolds comes out with Grange, right? Now, they ship those cases. Now, let's make pretend, as a future, they sell an NFT that represents a case of it. Now, you buy it, you own it. Because with the NFT, it's on the blockchain, it means you own it, which is different than the internet. Like Bitcoin, when you own a Bitcoin, you own it. That's what the blockchain does. And I know I'm going nerdy, so bear with me, everyone who's listening.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Carlos is all about his Dogecoin. He's in.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  I believe what you're about to see is a massive explosion of real-world goods on the blockchain. So I, Gary, can buy four NFTs that represents four six-packs of Grange. I have them.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  I wait four years, it's still sitting at Grange, or maybe at a warehouse. I want a six-pack for a party, I burn my NFT, redeem it, I give it, it gets shipped to me, I drink the wine. I don't want to hold on to it and want to sell it? Somebody can buy it off me on the blockchain.

• 25:42Speaker 04

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• 26:08Speaker 01

  With that, having them be moving across all those domestic travel, temperature changes.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  For wine, the blockchain's gonna be huge, because this way, you could just sit in temperature-controlled warehouses, but the commerce can happen on the blockchain, because there's ownership. I know this is like, not what people are paying attention to. I know some people are like, I don't get what he's saying. But I do think we will clip this clip in 10 years, and everyone's gonna understand exactly what I'm saying. And I think for wine, that will be a renaissance of collectability. And because of the, the friction gets eliminated by that technology. And so, I'm looking forward to that. And in fact, it's funny you bring it up. I've actually been thinking about buying a lot more super-premium wine in anticipation of this era.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Creating your own warehouse, we love that. Last question before you go, Gary, and thank you very much for your time. We actually met each other. I've got a photo, I'll bring it over so you can see it, but I mean, it doesn't really matter. I have a photo of us back in 2019, at a Vinomofol event for Empathy Wines, when you brought it to Australia. I've got a, I had a signed bottle of the rosé.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  I remember that night very well.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, rooftop in Melbourne. But that was a big project for you. As a businessman, you found the opportunity to exit it. But can you tell us about the rhyme and reason for starting that brand? Because there's quite a beautiful, holistic approach to it.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  There was so much to that wine. First, a lot of it started with my two co-founders, Nate and John. You know, they were two kids that started with me as interns in the wine business. Two, I thought there was a way to build a direct-to-consumer brand. Three, I wanted to make farmers more famous. If you look at the back of every bottle of Empathy Wines ever made, there are sketch drawings, like the Wall Street Journal, of the faces of the growers. And then, four, I knew even back then, there was a wine glut, and I knew that I could make $40, $50 wine for $20. And so, just, it was kind of like, no different than a good wine is maybe a nice blend of a couple of different grapes. All these different business truths created a scenario.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  And in fact, we were overly successful. What I mean by that is, it went so well, that Constellation came along and offered a pretty big number very quickly. And truthfully, I didn't want to sell, because I wanted to build it much longer. I thought there was more room for it to grow. But it was, it was definitely life-changing money for my two partners. They were both ironically engaged, both got engaged while we were building that company. And looking at these two faces, you know, and they felt like sons to me, these two. You know, looking at their two faces when the offer came through, and knowing that if I said yes, it would really be meaningful at a time that was important in our lives. So, you know, learned a lot. There was a lot that went into that wine.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  But featuring the growers, bringing remarkably high-quality wine to the consumer at a lower price, starting something with, you know, kids that grew up at my company, and marketing in a different way, and selling in a different way, all of those things were intoxicating. And it was a very fruitful chapter in my career.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Good wines as well, good, nice, beautiful, fresh rosés.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, rosés were bonkers. We really, that was, you know, rosés were so hot at that time. We wanted to make really real rosé that really blew people away. And, you know, actually buy a lot of rosé from Australia for wine text. But what we made there was a different level and caliber of rosé.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  There you go. Well, thank you very much, Gary.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just thinking that, obviously, we're having a wine chat, and you have a glass of wine. I mean, on this side of the world, it's 8:30 AM. We, we have nothing in front of us. I feel like, oh, Gary must be thinking, oh, what are these guys doing? They're not even sharing a glass of wine.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  That just means we have to do a part two, where I do it in the morning. We'll do that, man. Thank you for having me.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Otherwise, we have plenty of wine here, we could do a quick cheers, but.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Gary, thank you so much for your time. Really do appreciate it. And look forward to maybe joining one of those wine dinners, once upon a time.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  I'd love that. I'd love that. Stay watch.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Cheers, Gary.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention, and thanks for being part of the.

• 30:26Speaker 05

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• 31:23Speaker 02

  Journey. See you later.