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Experiences is a podcast about humans creating happy memories through their participation in the experience economy. We discuss how brick and mortar retail is changing rapidly, the clear winners in the experience economy, and visit with brands that are not just surviving, but thriving.
Hello. I am Mark Sandino with The Experiences Podcast, and I am really happy to be with Jennifer Halleck today of Halleck Vineyard. How are you doing, Jennifer?
Jennifer Halleck:Hi, Mark. I'm doing fine. Thanks. Thanks for doing a podcast with me.
Mark Sandeno:Oh, yeah. Doing a podcast. I know these are just long, drawn out conversations that are hopefully interesting to more than just you and I. But if that's all we get out of it, that will be fantastic because I am actually really interested in the wine industry. Your experiences has many customers in the brewery distillery and winery space.
Mark Sandeno:And for some reason, when I've talked to you in the past doing product support or just looking at the kind of experiences you're offering, your winery jumps out at me. And all we're gonna do today is we're just gonna talk about you. We're gonna talk about the business. We're gonna talk about what's working really well, especially as far as the experiential, the hospitality, and where you're taking their business. But let's just start first with your history with Halleck Vineyards.
Mark Sandeno:And that might be a lot, but just take it from wherever you wanna start.
Jennifer Halleck:Well, we started back in 1990. Ross Halleck, my ex husband and I moved up from the Bay Area. And he'd been doing work with wineries in Napa, and he decided he wanted to have a vineyard. We came up and after looking in a lot of places, Napa, Sonoma, Healdsburg, and when we got to Sebastopol, we just thought it looked perfect for raising a family and settling down, and we found a 5 acre spot that had vineyard potential. And at that time, there were no vineyards really in Sebastopol.
Jennifer Halleck:You had to go up to River Road if people know that area, or Iron Horse also had some vineyards. We're now in a little area just southwest of Sebastopol called Sebastopol Hills. And it's part of the Russian River Valley. At that time, it was part of Sonoma Coast. So we're right on the edge there.
Jennifer Halleck:We border it. And so we put a vineyard in it. We went up to Dailinger, which was on River Road, and he has really great back then. And we'd go hang out over there, and we'd taste his and we'd say, yeah. We wanna have something like this.
Jennifer Halleck:Unfortunately, a lot of our acreage was in a forest and a long driveway, and we didn't really, you know not being agricultural, we didn't really know that. So turns out we could only put in an acre of vineyard. So we put in our acre. Again, we were one of the first vineyards out there. But at that time, by 2000 that was in 1993, I think.
Jennifer Halleck:And so by 2000, other people had started putting in some vineyards. And Sebastopol was always known for gravenstein apples, and they still are. But a lot of the trees were getting old and that Washington was producing much better apples, and the industry started dying back. So there was this old apple packaging plant, which is just a lot of cement buildings behind cyclone fencing. The guy named Greg LaFollette turned one of them into a custom crush facility.
Jennifer Halleck:And he invited us in, and we brought our grapes there. And he made the wine for us. He had a winery back then. And we took that Pinot Noir out to San Francisco to something called the Pinot Noir Summit. And there were about 300 different Pinot noirs there, and still we were like, hey.
Jennifer Halleck:We're from Sebastopol. Anybody heard of Sebastopol? Nobody had heard of Sebastopol. And all of a sudden, we're in the back corner and someone, you know, it's way at the end of the event, and we've all been drinking and having a good time. And someone nudges us and said, hey.
Jennifer Halleck:They just called your name. And I was like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? They go, you won first place. We're like, oh, okay.
Jennifer Halleck:Well, I guess Sebastian Paul's a pretty good place to grow Pinot Noir then.
Mark Sandeno:This is amazing. Let me reflect back a little what I'm hearing. You and Ross decide. You get a wild hair. Hey.
Mark Sandeno:Let's get into this romantic industry. We love wine. By the way, how a lot of businesses start is a seed of a passion and really no idea how hard it's gonna be. And so you're one of those people and you come out, you buy a wooded piece of land not really suitable for growing. Your 1st year out, your 1st year, you take it and you win 1st prize at a significant event, you know, from your folding table on the back corner and your, you know,
Jennifer Halleck:little Exactly.
Mark Sandeno:Quickie mark sign. What did that feel like at the time?
Jennifer Halleck:It was really great to be able to take that be into San Francisco and start recording restaurants and say, hey, we won this award. And everybody back then was like, oh my god. You've got pinot noir. Back then, I would go to these big restaurants to sell the wine, and they'd have big huge books. And it would be like, oh, here's Bordeaux, and here's 20 pages of burgundy and cabernet, and here are other wines.
Jennifer Halleck:And they did one pinot noir. It's like, oh my god. But right when we were starting, like I said, other people were starting to plant pinot noir and it was beginning to catch on. Everybody loved it. It was super easy to sell.
Jennifer Halleck:It was like I had a red carpet in San Francisco to show this wine. So anyway, we went back to our winemaker, Greg LaFollette, and he said, you know, you guys should think about doing a winery. I'm gonna do a winery. You should think about doing a winery. And there were not very many wineries back then.
Jennifer Halleck:And by that time, we could go to these other vineyards and purchase their grapes, and then bring it into the custom crush and make those wines. That's what we started to do. It's just been 25 years of doing that.
Mark Sandeno:You have won many awards. Going back to the beginning, I really think these origin stories are super interesting. You're, of course, naturally glossing over a whole bunch of challenges and friction and problems, and we're getting some of the early high points. You've planted some grapes. How long did it take that initial acre crop of grapes to mature?
Mark Sandeno:Was it 18 months before you could harvest, or how long does that take?
Jennifer Halleck:We didn't really know what we were doing, and we flew up to Oregon to kinda see how they're planting. People were saying, oh, in Oregon, they're planting everything, you know, more compact. Go up and see what they're doing as opposed to the old California way, and we did that. And so then there was Dutton Farms and they put in all the hardware for us, you know, the stakes and everything. And then we had to find grapes.
Jennifer Halleck:And so I pull out a phone book and I go down the list, If you remember what phone books are in the yellow pages. The first couple of ones that I went to, you know, they were little box ads. And they're like, oh, we don't have any pinot noir. And I'm like, what? What do you mean you don't have any pinot noir?
Jennifer Halleck:These are nurseries for Vine. So then the 3rd line down was John Caldwell Nursery. Didn't have an ad or anything, and I just called them. And this guy was like, oh, yeah. I've got these great Dijon clones, and I'll get you this great variety.
Jennifer Halleck:Oh, yeah. This will be great, and we'll do it green growing, which means that they graft it before you plant it. Usually, you plant the root stock, and then you come in later and put the vine on. Well, we did these called green growing because that was all he had. And then later, I would tell people that story and they're like, John called.
Jennifer Halleck:Well, got you your vine. But I'm like, yeah. Why? And I've never met John. Well, it turns out that John has got a a winery over in Napa, and he has caves and everything, which I've never gone to, and I really should.
Jennifer Halleck:He's the guy who went over and did little clippings in Dijon and brought back the Dijon clones. And he got caught in coming over the Canadian border, and, you know, he's kind of a cowboy.
Mark Sandeno:Wow. You dug up, an OG artist, a wine artist.
Jennifer Halleck:Yeah. And so he's definitely got a name for himself. So it's pretty funny. We planted those in, like, 93, 94 while we're having our 3 children. And at first, we sold in 99.
Jennifer Halleck:Everybody said don't take the first grapes, like, let it mature. So in 99, we harvested our first crop. And we sold them to Fred Scherer of Scherer Winery. And he at that time was the winemaker over at Dahlinger, so we kinda knew him. The small community back then.
Jennifer Halleck:I tell you, I used to go to, like, the local restaurants and bump into all the other local winemakers at that time because it just wasn't very many of us. You know, there was, like, 6 of us or something.
Mark Sandeno:Is this early California wine notoriety in general? Napa Valley wasn't the thing it is today at that point?
Jennifer Halleck:Oh, no. Napa was Napa's been huge for a long time.
Mark Sandeno:So Napa was big, and the Sonoma County stuff really hadn't caught on yet in
Jennifer Halleck:So Sonoma is between Napa and the Pacific Ocean. So we're west of them. And it starts with the town of Sonoma, Kenwood, all that. You get over to Santa Rosa, and then you have Healdsburg and Sebastopol. And so there was wine happening in Healdsburg, Sonoma, but this area I'm in is considered West County, and it's Sebastopol, Forestville.
Mark Sandeno:And so this has just been in the last 25 years has come up where there was a lot of velocity from Napa West kinda pushing out your direction to make this all happen? Yep. Okay. Interesting.
Jennifer Halleck:You know, we'll always be under Napa. You know, Napa always outperforms us in every way, but, we love Sonoma County. Anyone who lives here loves Sonoma County. It's so beautiful. Rolling hills.
Jennifer Halleck:You got the ocean. You got the redwoods.
Mark Sandeno:Oh, yeah. It's famous. I'm in Seattle, but, you know, someone says Sonoma Sonoma County, it evokes kind of a romance and a little bit of mystery. It's you know, that part of the world down there is so beautiful. So
Jennifer Halleck:Well, it's really sprawling, so it takes couple of hours to go from one end to the next. It's all country roads. Whereas, Napa is this one long valley, and everything is off of that main road. Sonoma County is much more sprawling. To get to our place, we are way out in West County, and you wouldn't even think there are grapes up there.
Jennifer Halleck:It's kinda so separated.
Mark Sandeno:So let's get back to the making this happen. So, ostensibly, you have enough cash to move there and get things started. But I imagine pulling the trigger and and saying, oh, yeah. We just wanna become a winery is challenging. Right?
Jennifer Halleck:Well, what we have going for us is that we use a custom crush facility. So we do not own the building. We don't own the labor, you know, we don't employ the laborers. We don't have the tanks, the bottling line, all of that. We paid for it all and someone else owns it all.
Mark Sandeno:And that's pretty common. Right?
Jennifer Halleck:I think it's become more common. There are now a lot of small wineries in Sonoma County, and there are a lot of custom crushed facilities. Actually, our custom crushed facility just closed down after 20 some years, and we actually have just moved over to another custom crushed facility. So it is a model. It makes you much more flexible.
Jennifer Halleck:So, like, when the fires happened in 2020, it happened early in August. Usually, the fires don't come until October and everything's been picked. This was in August, and it tainted all the grapes. We decided not to make wine that year. And so we didn't have all the cost that we had to keep paying for.
Jennifer Halleck:We're lucky to have that flexibility.
Mark Sandeno:You pay more in your cost of goods sold, but when you're not bottling, you're not paying anything. Let's jump forward a little bit. You win this award. What's the span of time between taking 1st place in a significant wine competition and all the leverage that gives you with restaurants? And by the way, how much that first year, how many cases of wine did you even have off a acre of grapes to sell?
Mark Sandeno:Did it go pretty quick?
Jennifer Halleck:You would think so. We've gotten awards. We'll publish the awards, and you'll get a little bit of sales from them. We would think, like, oh, it's gonna be sold out in a day. You know?
Jennifer Halleck:Like, no. It doesn't happen. We are much more realistic now. Not in this to, you know, become the bell of the ball. We used to go to Napa and to the wine auctions and just see how much money was being spent there and, you know, all the notoriety that some of these wineries have.
Jennifer Halleck:But, you know, after 20 years, we are still we make 25 100 cases a year, and we sell to our wine club members, and we're still very small. But to transition there, one thing that did happen is we did have a wine club. We had people come for taste things, and we were, you know, just struggling along. 2008 hit. And at that time, we were building our distribution, and so I was going out to all these different states and cooking up with all these different distributors.
Jennifer Halleck:And in 2008, everything crashed. So all of a sudden, nobody's going out to eat. So the restaurants aren't working through their inventory, so they're not ordering anything from the distributors, and the distributors are not buying from anyone else. And on top of that, when you're really, really small, there just isn't that brand name to create a lot of resales and it just turned out that the only time we would really be selling to restaurants is if we went out there to sell. So it wasn't like this great thing where the distributors were reordering and reordering and reordering.
Jennifer Halleck:We had to do a lot of work for that. And so in 2008, we just decided, you know what? We are going straight only DTC at that point, and we're just gonna do it all over the Internet. That was kind of the beginning of when people there are people at home that can't go out, but they can make a nice dinner and they can have a nice bottle of wine. So they kinda figured out, hey.
Jennifer Halleck:That'll be our thing. We'll just buy direct from the winery at a third of what the restaurant would charge them. And once you have a really nice time at home, and that's kind of when people started realizing they could buy things over the Internet, because it was still a new market. So we were kind of right there at the beginning of that.
Mark Sandeno:Yeah. So that's fantastic. And you're right. You know, the public's comfort with buying direct. And so your timing was really good, and I love that bold move to say, okay.
Mark Sandeno:We're either going to create a sales team and hustle these restaurants and do all these tastings. I used to be a when I was in my college years, I was a waiter at semi fine dining establishments, and the people would come in and you do wine tastings, and we always love those. You know, that's a hustle in and of itself. So you said, hey. Let's make our hustle going out and finding our customers online and enjoy all the additional margin and then not have to hassle with, you know, beating the street.
Mark Sandeno:As you've heard in this interview, we're talking to retailers that host people. And how do you do that? Well, there has to be a way for people to book their experience with you. It's our contention that the world needs another booking tool like it needs another hole in its head. That's not what we need.
Mark Sandeno:What we need is a platform for bookable retail, and that's what the experience app is all about. In just a few clicks, if you happen to be a Shopify ecommerce user, you can add bookable experiences to your website. They're on brand. It's at your domain. It's done through the Shopify checkout, and you control the data right there in the admin.
Mark Sandeno:You can transfer customers. You can create scannable QR codes. They can be reminded of their upcoming experiences, and it integrates really nicely with everything you do as a retailer. So you're selling your products right next to your bookable experiences, and you don't have to use things like Eventbrite or Ticketmaster or one of the other 1,000 bookable tools out there. If you want the tool that works for you as you host people in your retail environment, which quite frankly is pretty much table stakes these days in an era where people don't have to leave their home to buy anything.
Mark Sandeno:They're gonna come out to create a memory with you. Go to experiencesapp.com for a free 14 day trial. Doesn't require a credit card to do the 14 day trial. And by the way, if the 14 day trial isn't long enough, just hit us up in the in app chat and we'll extend it for you. So thanks for listening.
Mark Sandeno:Experiencesapp.com. Go there today. Add it to your Shopify store. And if you're not already a Shopify entrepreneur, this would be a great time to start. Go to shopify.com, get your store going, and then immediately go over and add the experiences app to your store.
Mark Sandeno:Once again, this is Mark Sandino, the CEO of experiences. We hope to see you soon. Let's pivot into talking about that business because that's clearly what you're successful at now is that wine club in the hospitality side of your business, the experiences.
Jennifer Halleck:So if you go back to 2,009, 2010, still the Internet was not where it is today. Now we have SEO ing and we have people searching and people wanna come to Sonoma County to taste Pinot Noir, but back then, that wasn't really a thing. Didn't seem to really be happening. So I had this idea that to get people up to visit us, I reached out to all of the private schools in the San Francisco area, and I offered a luncheon up at Hallock Vineyard for 8 people. And it was an auction item that they put up.
Jennifer Halleck:And they loved it. Everyone was like, seriously? And so I'd send that to them and then people would come up and we still have so many club members who came to us from them. And they'll be like, oh, yeah. I remember when I came up.
Jennifer Halleck:And my 3 sons would help me. We'd cook, and they'd serve it, and do oh, I remember when your sons were doing that. And it was a great experience. It was really fun. And so that's how we got kind of some of our beginning customers.
Mark Sandeno:You basically said, hey. Who's our demographic? Well, it's the kind of people that send their kids to private school. So let's go. And, really, if you think about it, it's an amazing low cost advertising.
Mark Sandeno:There's that magic when people are having this high context experience with you. Unless you really flub it up, you're gonna get some traction. And if you do a good job like you did, they're gonna fall in love with you. And so when they were there okay. So they're up for this special experience.
Mark Sandeno:It's a wine tasting. Hey. We're gonna walk the vines, and we're gonna do a little education or whatever it was that you did. Did you just come right out and say, we would love for you to join our wine club, and we're offering you a discount today, or, like, how did they become long term customers?
Jennifer Halleck:You know, we always have a form. I mean, I can't remember it at this exact moment, but we would give them a form that would have a list of the wines Here, if you wanna buy any of our wines or if you wanna join our wine club, and it would just be right there. I was pretty forthcoming in giving them that form for sure.
Mark Sandeno:Right. But you're not twisting anybody's arms. That experience is driving the whole value home. Right?
Jennifer Halleck:Right. And, you know, so these are people you have to assume that anybody, even now when people come out to have a tasting and they're spending money on it, that they are there because they wanna know about Pinot Noir, and they wanna taste good Pinot Noir. And they already know, you know, how much our Pinot Noir cost. You can go and see how much it costs, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah.
Jennifer Halleck:So those people had purchased that. And sometimes it would be just the people who purchased it, and then they would just invite their friends as the other six people, or they'd bring their family. It wasn't always, like, 4 couples who all joined the club or whatever. It's really great to have those memories. I love that people have a great memory like that of coming to our winery.
Mark Sandeno:Right. And for your wines, the pinot noirs are about a $100 a bottle. Is that if you are in the wine club, or could I swing by?
Jennifer Halleck:They're not all that high. So we start at about $59 up to a $120, and we have single vineyards that are in between that. Some mix of vineyards that we call couvets, pinot noir couvets. It's all pinot noir, but it's different vineyards put together. Yeah.
Jennifer Halleck:And then people come up, and they can buy those wines that day. They can join the wine club that day. We don't discount our wines. We just don't make enough of it that that was not really in the model for us. But if you join the wine club, then you get free shipping on 6 bottles.
Jennifer Halleck:So our wine club is 6 bottles 2 times a year, and you get free shipping anytime you order 6 bottles. So, you know, in this day and age, that's worth a bottle of wine because it is so expensive to ship, really.
Mark Sandeno:Yeah. When you're shipping water, it gets really expensive along with all the other good stuff that's in a bottle of wine. Okay. Let's talk about this. The reason I know you is because you use the experiences app to add the bookable experiences to your Shopify store.
Mark Sandeno:You're seemingly all in on experiences. How does this act of hospitality what do you like about it? How does it benefit your business? How critical is it to your business?
Jennifer Halleck:You know, people don't buy wine over the Internet if they haven't tasted it. Unless it's one of those companies that are giving you, you know, an incredible, you know, $10 for, you know, 7 bottles of wine or something. Sure. They'll do that way. If they're going to invest in something like our wine, they wanna taste it first.
Jennifer Halleck:So no matter how many awards you win, no matter what happens, they wanna taste it first. And so we have a great guy, Eric Schwartzman, who does our SEO ing. We've just learned that that is super important because you need to have people find you online. And then once they find you online, you need to have a beautiful website, a beautiful, story on the website to entice them to wanna come to your winery.
Mark Sandeno:Okay. So let's just take a second to call out your website. I would say, hey. If you're listening to this and you have your headphones in, go to hallick vineyard. That's hallickvineyardvine yard.com.
Mark Sandeno:And follow along as we talk about the website here because it is a beautiful website. It's great photography. Eric has done a really good job with the content. So you have a tool, Shopify, which most people know what Shopify is. It's the underlying platform that provides all the functionality for the commerce part of it.
Mark Sandeno:You've got this website, some meat aerial views of the winery and the surrounding area, beautiful product shots, building community through wine tagline. You definitely follow through on that. You have the social proof of the awards, clearly a high quality product, and then some really neat lifestyle photography of people enjoying wine and doing all this kind of stuff. And so this is going out SEO for those who don't know what that is. Search engine optimization is the process of arranging the content a little bit of the technology on the site to make sure you show up really well in search engines.
Mark Sandeno:But you're doing this. People are finding you. Are most of the people who become your customers California natives?
Jennifer Halleck:I'd say 5050. If I look at our customer base, 50% are from California, majority of that from Northern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and then the rest of them are around the United States.
Mark Sandeno:So how does someone from, let's say, Connecticut who maybe doesn't have a strong referral and who's never tasted the wine, how do they become a member? Do they order one bottle and say, oh, this is fantastic. I'm gonna become a club member?
Jennifer Halleck:Well, no. That's what I'm saying. They don't do that, especially at $75 for a bottle of wine and then shipping on top of it. It's really expensive.
Mark Sandeno:And so that's where experiences comes in where they click on tasting. They book a tasting of which if you go to the website, there's your estate vineyard wine tasting experience. You get to sip 6 wines and get some as you put it local delicacies.
Jennifer Halleck:And we walk it through with education and anecdotes and teach you how to taste wine and talk about the pairings and everything.
Mark Sandeno:That's what I wanted to ask you about. When I talk to some of our more successful customers, it's not necessarily that they have a script. There's theme, there's staging, and there's the way they welcome people into their experience. Do you kinda have a way of doing this that you have found works and is most effective and is reproducible?
Jennifer Halleck:We do. When I used to do them, not so much. I would just you know, because if I'm telling you just like this podcast, I'll just talk about whatever we're gonna talk about. But Ross was very specific about what he'd like to talk about, and now we've got 3 other people who do the tastings for us. Ross and I don't do them anymore.
Jennifer Halleck:They definitely have a script that they follow. Now everybody's got their own things to talk about. They're all well versed in wine, especially one guy, David. He's been in the industry so long and he's just hysterical and he everybody loves to go and hear David's stories. Like, we have specific things that we do like to talk about.
Jennifer Halleck:One of them is our logo. And so our logo is a circle, and that circle represents our community. It's like an h inside, but it's 2 lines with a dot. And so those two lines are 2 people, and in between is the grape and how the grape or the glass of wine brings people together. And then the circle is our community.
Jennifer Halleck:So and then we do building community through wine.
Mark Sandeno:What we've learned about the experience economy, which is traditionally sports, travel, entertainment, and dining, is in an era where you don't have to leave your home to buy anything. Going somewhere and having an experience and creating a memory is what people really are paying for. Now in your case with consumables like wine, it's hard to justify paying the significant cost to ship those kind of things unless you know it's gonna be really, really good. And, naturally, the wine industry, to facilitate purchases, you kinda need to bring people to you. You know, I've been on a number of wine tastings, and I've done brewery tours and distillery experiences.
Mark Sandeno:And just to be completely honest, like, I do love Pinot Noir. We have some friends who have a winery in, Salem called Zenith, and they were early Pinot Noir people as well. And I that was where I got introduced to Pinot Noir. And honestly, at first, it wasn't my favorite wine. I noticed it had a lot of character, but it didn't have that big, huge Kool Aid like juiciness that Cab gave me.
Mark Sandeno:And as a young wine drinker, that appealed to me. Over the years, I've come to really enjoy Pinot Noir, partially because of the experiences that I've had at some of these wineries. When I really think about what I love is that wine that I experienced is coupled with me wandering the vineyard being guided. Some of the mist kind of hanging on the hills, taking a handful of grapes and chewing them and spinning them out, and then being there for harvest. It creates this indelible, super durable nostalgia.
Mark Sandeno:And I imagine you're doing the same thing at Halleck.
Jennifer Halleck:We used to have them come the morning of harvest. I give them banana bread and coffee that I had made. I'd give them all cutters and gloves, and they'd go out and they'd pick the whole thing. And then we would do a party afterwards, a lunch afterwards where I made all the food. And it's a huge ordeal, but it was so fun.
Jennifer Halleck:And that's how we would pick our grapes each year. And then 1 year, you always have to plant it on a Saturday. And by the time Saturday came, you have to call your pick when's the best day to do it. And you could be 3 or 4 days late, and you've ruined the harvest. And so that's what happened is that everyone got up there to pick them, and it's like, oh my god.
Jennifer Halleck:These should've been picked 4 days ago. So we said, okay. That's not gonna happen anymore. So we don't have people to pick them anymore, but we still do do a harvest party. And we're having our 25th harvest party a week from Saturday.
Mark Sandeno:How powerful for your business specifically? Let's just get a little crass and talk about the financial upside. How powerful have helping people have these moments with you been for your business?
Jennifer Halleck:You know, we're small and what we find is that coming to the house, coming to the vineyard, like you said, that's gonna cement the memory in place. And it's gonna make that wine taste even better because you've been there. Like, somehow being part of the story makes it even better. But we do do other things. We go out to people's houses, and we do tastings, and that's really popular.
Jennifer Halleck:So we'll go to your house, and we'll do a tasting for 12 to 20 of your friends, and we'll bring the wine. And people enjoy that because they get to meet us. And because we're so small, You know, they like being able to connect with us. I'm amazed that people will call and I'll answer it and they're like, oh my god. I got a person.
Jennifer Halleck:They're like, yeah. You got Jennifer, you know. Everything has become so computerized. We're trying to really keep the personal touch throughout the experience. Even though they may not be able to all come to the vineyard, if we came out there, that's an experience.
Jennifer Halleck:I just came back from Africa with our wine club. So we went and did a safari for 2 weeks. And it was so awesome to every night be there, bring out the halloween yard wine while you're at your lodge, and be with all these people who have been long time members, you know, and just fans. But, oh, I love this halloween yard wine. It's so special to have these communities, you know, these people coming together and to me to be part of that community too, not just aside from me.
Mark Sandeno:Yeah. I can imagine how wonderful that is. And by the way, just casually dropping that you're doing these international wine tours. Listeners might say, holy cow. So what's that all about?
Jennifer Halleck:We do it for our inner circle. The our wine club is called our inner circle, and I'm about to put out our next one. We're going to Africa again next September. And so we go with the guy who's a wildlife photographer, and he has other trips. I had so much fun on this one that he has other trips to India to go see the tigers, to Alaska to go see the bears, to go to the Galapagos, you know, on a ship.
Jennifer Halleck:Ross has taken people to Honduras. He's taken people to Italy. And usually, it's, you know, a group of 10 people or whatever. We are beginning to put together smaller trips, like, to go kayaking somewhere, to go, scuba diving together. Our idea is to build community through wine.
Jennifer Halleck:What do you like to do? Well, let's go do that. Let's plan something around that great height, and we'll bring the wine so that we have really good wine to drink.
Mark Sandeno:And so to be able to even have the opportunity to pay to go on one of these trips, you gotta be a part of the inner circle.
Jennifer Halleck:Right. The inner circle really fills it up quickly.
Mark Sandeno:What an amazing business. Okay. To end, imagine a brand new wine entrepreneur or really any food and beverage entrepreneur is listening, and they're thinking, this sounds amazing. I want to go to there as the great Liz Lemon says. What advice would you give them?
Jennifer Halleck:I tell them a couple of things. Ross' favorite line is the way to make a $1,000,000 at a winery is to start with, you know, 5,000,000. It's not a place to make money. It's a lifestyle. And, like, I'm on the computer all the time now, but I'm talking to people.
Jennifer Halleck:I'm selling wine where it's just great to be around really good products. So I really enjoy that part of it. It's been great to dive into the agricultural part of it and to learn all about the grape growing and, you know, we're not making Coca Cola, you know. So there's definitely a lot more heart in the whole thing. So I've loved that part of it.
Jennifer Halleck:And you've gotta just jump off. Like, people come here just to know what kind of oh my god. I wanna buy a Vineyard property. I wanna move out there. It's like, well, you just gotta do it.
Jennifer Halleck:It's never gonna just happen. You know? And I would say the same thing. I wanna move to Belize and go scuba diving every day, and wow, could I do that? Somebody has done it because they just made the choice and they did it.
Jennifer Halleck:You do have to jump ship and actually come up and buy the property and get it going.
Mark Sandeno:So first step is against all recommendations and sanity. If you feel that passion or that desire, just pull the trigger, make it happen. And then what might be a step too?
Jennifer Halleck:Well, I would say one thing about our wineries, we have a winemaker, but we are not the winemakers. Majority of the wineries that get started are started by the actual winemakers. You know, if you are really gonna do it, I would say go get your degree in enology and learn how to make a wine or come up and work a harvest and see what that feels like. So we're a little bit unusual that although we do all the blending and we have our hands deep inside of what that final product's gonna taste like, we are not at the winery every day making sure that that's all working. If you're gonna start a winery, you should probably come up and learn how to make wine first.
Mark Sandeno:What would you say about making sure that you're offering experiences around your thing? How, when, and how should they start doing that, and what have you learned is the best way to do that?
Jennifer Halleck:Depends on if you're coming in and buying an existing winery or starting from scratch. If you start from scratch, you've gotta grow the grapes first, which takes years. A lot of people also come up and they'll buy a property. They'll buy a vineyard. And when we were starting out, a lot of people bought that vineyard or planted a vineyard.
Jennifer Halleck:That's what we did. We planted a vineyard and then started a winery around that. I would say the experiences part would be down the road once you have product to sell. So maybe in a brewery, they have products to sell right away. But in a winery, that wine's gonna sit there for several years before you have something to sell.
Jennifer Halleck:It's gotta mature a little bit.
Mark Sandeno:I love your story. Halek is super interesting. I encourage everyone who's listening to go check it out, get in the inner circle, and take one of these amazing trips to Africa or the Galapagos. You know, thank you so much for your time today, and I look forward to, chatting with you again in the future.
Jennifer Halleck:Thank you so much.
Mark Sandeno:Thank you.