Ep. 1657 Sheila Donohue | Voices With Cynthia Chaplin

Welcome to the Italian Great Geek podcast. Join us as we explore personal stories of travel and tasting with Italy's must know grape for idols. Chart your own course with my Italian Great Geek journal, your personal tasting companion to accompany the series. Available now on Amazon. With thanks to calendula and partners for their generous support with this project. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. I'm Cynthia Chaplin, and this is voices. Every Wednesday, I will be sharing conversations with international wine industry professionals discussing issues in diversity, equity and inclusion through their personal experiences working in the field of wine. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and rate our show wherever you get your pods. Hello. This is Cynthia Chaplin, and today I am delighted to welcome Sheila Donahue to voices. Sheila is a fellow Vini to the International Academy Italian wine Ambassador, and she's a New Yorker who spent twenty years living in Italy. She's in California now where she started her company, Veravino, in two thousand and eighteen, with the idea to bring small production, sustainably made, authentic wines, and olive oils, and foods to the USA. So thank you for coming, Sheila. Thank you for being with us today. Ah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. Well, it's an interesting story because your original career was in financial technology and sales and marketing. So how in the world did you end up in wine? What happened? Yeah. So just to talk a little bit about, you know, me. So I I come from New York and originally from the banking technology world. So I was living in New York, before I got an offer to, work for a firm in Bologna, Italy. In around, you know, year two thousand. Let's just say I I had a kinda like a sex in the city life, but one of the things that I would do, I would go to wine tastings in in New York City. And and that's really how I kinda got into wine. I I remember I was at a wine tasting for for Supertuscans, and I asked my friend, Mariana, what's a Supertuscan? And, you know, so kind of my my curiosity about Italian wines, started then And then, and then I I moved to to Bologna for, you know, for my work. When I realized I was gonna be staying for for a bit, I, well, I'm, in general, a cur curious person. So I, I basically, I found my, you know, my, my local, like, Enoltaica that I was, like, my go to, the first couple of years in Bologna, these two two sis sisters that ran it. And, and I I just like how I would go in and they would just suggest new wines to me. And and I started to just learn then about the, the, the variety of Italian wines fast forward, a couple years. I I wind up actually taking a, a Sommelier course, with the Italian Association of Sommeliers. Within, you know, a couple years, I was a certified Sommelier. I was still working in in banking and technology. First did, on the side is I started to organize, these sort of social wine tasting, evenings in bologna because I realized that Italians were taking their wine too seriously. And you there there needed to be sort of a, kind of like an education, you know, exploration of wine, but in a, like, a social setting. So I I started these wine mingle events in bologna. Then I had a year of sabbatical in two thousand seventeen, which, which was my year of of of exploring, whether I I would really go into the wine industry. That's amazing. That's such a cool story. I mean, it's Taking the sommelier courses is not something one does likely. I've done it myself, and it is quite an effort, especially because it's all in Italian and quite formal Italian. And lots and lots of men who aren't all that happy about foreign women coming in to take their Sommelier course. So that's a very cool sort of story how you got going. So you took your sabbatical and you decided it was time to go into wine. Yeah. And it but it wasn't like immediate. So You know, I I knew I wasn't gonna be make making much money working in the wine industry, as you can imagine. That is true. You know, going from banking technology to to wine. However, I was piecing together a puzzle in in a during that year of sabbatical. And and I did wanna do something entrepreneurial to help small, companies. I wanted to do something innovative. I, in my banking technology career, a lot of the innovation that I did focused around small businesses. And so I I wind up really thinking about a new, you know, an opportunity for a new, business. And I, you know, I realized that a lot of the producers that I knew, which were, of course, mostly Italian, they their wines were not yet in the US. And then some friends of mine, they all also make olive oil as well. And a lot of the producers also make olive oil. So I saw, likewise, there was an opportunity also with with, food. So I, I I did, you know, more and more research. Like, why, you know, why are these small guys, not in the US, and I spoke with numerous importers in the US. And and they basically, you know, admitted that they hadn't been able to, crack the knot on small producers. And it is an economies of scale, business, and I got it. So then I thought, hey, you know, what if he applied a different approach in which you could sell all across the US? To, any, you know, basically any, business, any tier in the three tier system, that would be, distributors, wine stores, and restaurants. And also be able to sell to consumers. So I I I can't tell you how many times I would read an article about a wine and I would look it up and I couldn't find it. I couldn't buy it. So I wanted to just to have the ability for anyone and everyone to buy these these hidden gems till they run out. Basically, it's it's like a scarcity model as well. And then, yeah, then I I, you know, make Nate a go of it and, and actually we're celebrating five years this month of, you know, of actually, you know, being in the market, having product and selling and doing events and stuff like that. So it's really exciting. Oh, it's amazing. Congratulations. Sounds like you came, you know, with with a solid background of of business information. So let me ask you, how does the company operate? You said, you know, we're all very well aware of the three tier system in the US and how much of an obstacle that can be to smaller producers. So how are you operating? Are you doing e commerce? What are you doing? Yeah. So we are a omnichannel. What we how we started, back five five years ago. It's, you know, it's very grassroots and, and so we we are a distributor in in California. So I I started to to sell to wine stores and restaurants in in in initially in, mostly in Southern California. And then I also found consumers that were interested in in purchasing as well and started to collaborate, for example, with this South LA wine club is, you know, a group of wine enthusiasts and, and I would do wine tastings with them. The following year, I found a distributor in New York. So, we started to sell also in in New York and wine stores and restaurants there. And, and then we set up our website. So people could could buy, online, you know, solely but surely we we started to grow and then then there was COVID. So fortunately, we were already online, at that point. And then, you know, COVID definitely put a a rent a wrench and, you know, in everything, basically. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people thought, oh, we know people must be buying boatloads of your wine. And and honestly, and and you probably you might know this from from Italy. It was the same scenario. But initially, people were just buying in, like, supermarkets and big stores. And ours our our wines are mostly sold in in small boutique places, you know, whether their stores obviously, you know, restaurants as well. And so initially, it was tough going during the the lockdowns. We know we we did start to do then as we started our Verotalk series. So so we got, you know, we started to schedule these zooms in which we, you know, we spoke with the producers while they were in their winery or in their vineyard. And we just invited whoever wanted to participate and talk to them and and get to know them and learn their wines and do a virtual tasting. So that, you know, that was a great, you know, result from, you know, from from the lockdowns because we still continue to do them because it's a great way to connect people to the produce when they, I mean, besides the fact that the producers don't have to travel, but it's also great because you can see their their winery and vineyards from from afar. We, you know, we just kind of, continued to grow, It's been, again, an organic growth. Word of mouth is the, the essence for, you know, for finding out about these these hidden gems. Verrow is a brand of trust. And, you know, and and people, frankly, they they buy wine from people they trust. This year, we've been focusing a lot on on getting distributors, more distributors state by state Even that ironically, we're not surprisingly, I should say it's the small distributors that are are interested in what we do. So, on on, unknowingly, my my love for small businesses has resulted in a supply chain of small businesses. So producers are small. The clients are small. The end clients are small. So it's all good. Well, that's fantastic. I mean, it's I'm not sure everybody who's listening knows that the word vero means real or true in Italian. So clearly you've had this vision, you know, you just said Vero is a brand of trust. You know, you have this vision of bringing a true or a real philosophy to your business. How are you incorporating, like, the essence of Vero into the business? So, we do you could say a screening when we get to know producers. It's really more just getting to know each producer. We kinda have a a a list of criteria that we we look for honestly, the smaller, the better because that makes it just got that much more special. Yeah, I mean, we are our our model is based on a scarcity model. So, you know, these products are gonna run out. So, you know, they're often scarce for a good reason. Because they come from just a really small, you know, area. Let's just say. Or, obviously, there might might be high demand for the for the product as well. Of course, we want we want them to be as sustainable as possible Honestly, with small producers, that's another benefit because they're farming their own land. And and they're making sure that they're gonna take care good care of that land. In fact, an interesting example of this is when I visited the the Corino family in Castillo last year. The main, like, figurehead for the winery Lorenzo Corino had recently passed. He was the fifth generation, so we we were meeting with this six generation Guido Corino. We were walking around as property and, and we were on, like, right at the end of of their property next to their neighbors. And it was along the Stutt Road where my rights side was the Corino vineyard that was up about five feet and then down by my feet level was the neighbor's property. And and Guido said he remember he remembers as a child that his neighbor's property was at the same level as the Corino family property. And sure enough, you know, over the years farming in a conventional way, soil, you know, erodes. So anyway, that's just an example of one of the benefits of farming sustainably, like, for goodness sake, you know, you want your your land to to last. You know, we're wanting your soil to, like, you know, disappear. No. True. Too right. Well, it's so interesting because this is all part of telling the real story, you know, again, this idea of Vero being real and being true and telling the story of these small producers who don't have a gigantic marketing engine to, you know, sort of fill people in about what they're doing and what makes them special. So I'm wondering, do you provide information to your customers about the wines and their producers? You know, how are you approaching the storytelling aspect of Veravino and how you're selecting these producers? Well, after we after we select a producer, then we, like, we onboard them. I mean, a lot of that just involves, sort of the, you know, typical steps that an importer would would go through to to bring in product and into America. And then we we put together a kind of uh-uh what's the pitch, if you will, for for this producer and and for the product. So we, you know, we we want the key messages to come out because we also need to be convinced why did we bring in this producer? Why is this producer important to us? Cause it is a lot of work to sell wine in in America. I can I can say that? So so all of those, you know, points are points that, you know, we need to be convinced of and then we we pass those messages on to our clients and and we we invest a lot in marketing. We, write our own, content. We write articles that we publish pretty much once a week. And those are all about getting not only getting the stories out about the producers, but also explaining, you know, what the grape is. Like, we we just did an article, for example, on Barbara. And it's really interesting because, you know, we I have, you know, wrote this article about Barbara, and I'm reading it. I'm like, oh my Oh my goodness. Parbera is the perfect rate for climate change because it thrives in in hot temperature and it has high acidity. So, anyway, That's, you know, that's just a small example of one of the things that we we do, you know, with with our company. But we we really this is what I enjoy about the the business is continuing to learn from my perspective, but then passing that that knowledge and these little nuggets of information to our clients and our followers. And then this year, we basically launched our, our YouTube channel. So we're very active on on YouTube. You should follow us on Verovino. Definitely. Well, it's interesting. I'm just wondering, you know, you've been at this now for five years. You you're you've been talking to people on COVID, which was, you know, painful. We we all had to do wind things over, you know, zoom calls during that. So a period of time that brought some innovation, but was a struggle for sure. What sort of trends are you seeing among your consumers? You know, have have things changed since before COVID to what they're buying now? How much they spend? You know, what kind of wines they're interested in? What are you seeing in the states with your consumers? That's funny. You you asked that question because I'm kind of scratching my head myself, because we're wine sales are down about seven percent this year in in America. Yeah. We're well aware of it. We know. So, I mean, the good news though is that, when when you peel the onion, the the segments, the niches that we specialize in are growing. So organic wine, natural wine, sustainable wine, dynamic wine, alternative wine, So all those niches are growing. So clearly there are consumers out there thirsting for the types of wines that we have. So the challenge is, you know, how how can we get to those those consumers. And, like, like, I'll give you an example. We sell around the country, but our our boots on the ground are primarily in Southern California. And I am a, a gen x and most of my friends are our gen x, trying to get more people interested in our, in our wines from from younger generations. So, for example, like, I'm trying to meet with with some I mean, you can use the word influencer, but it doesn't have to be an influencer, millennial or or or gen z, wine lovers that will get to know about our company and and realize that, you know, we we we have, a lot of wines that that that they would love. You know, so it's like re reaching those audiences can be. To be honest, I don't like to use use the word difficult. You just have a lot you need to have a lot of patience. And, you know, they say that people have to see something seven times before they take an action. So you just have to have a lot of patience in order to, arrive, and and and reach a certain audience that that you wanna reach. So it's that patience, you know, just to kinda be convinced that you're doing the right thing. And then and then just slowly but surely just, you know, keep keep moving forward, getting the messages out, getting the stories out, authentic way, which is what we do. Well, it's interesting. These trends, we we we keep close tabs on the numbers, globally, but particularly in the US, which is such a big market for Italian wine. And we know the numbers, are tending down a little bit, particularly as you said, among younger consumers and people who are new to wine. So I know that part of your ethos is encouraging consumers to sip and savor your wines while learning about the artisanal intricacies that went into the farm and went into making them. I know people are interested particularly in the states and particularly in that demographic. My kids fall right into that demographic. They're all in their mid twenties, to to sort of very, very early thirties. How are you rolling out this idea of natural wines, low alcohol wines, how are you reaching consumers and and how do you envision them enjoying these wines? You know, you as you said, you kind of have to educate them. You have to show it to them seven times before they are gonna pick up a glass or buy a bottle. So how are you driving your messages on those trends, you know, the the sort of the natural wines, the biodynamic wines, the wines that seem to be trending up in the US. What are you doing? Are you enjoying this podcast? Don't forget to visit our YouTube channel, mama jumbo shrimp. For fascinating videos covering Stevie Kim and her travels across Italy and beyond, meeting winemakers, eating local foods and taking in the scenery. Now back to the show. Well, one of the primary things that we're doing is, is that we we have a a content calendar that we, we plan out in that content calendar or are these, subjects that we're gonna cover. You know, we'll decide, sometimes, honestly, an idea comes about spontaneously. It's not really necessarily planned like months in advance, but we'll, you know, we'll come up with an idea and then we'll, we write an article, but then with that article, we'll we'll also have a a YouTube video. And, and then we, you know, we publish the article. We have a newsletter and then we get the word out via social media. We we use, Instagram, Facebook, Instagram primarily. However, I personally use, LinkedIn as a way to get the word out. Also, that's important for us because we're omnichannel. So I I do want to get the word out, especially to distributors that we're trying to seek more of across the US. We also have a publicist that works with us and and she's you know, always on the lookout for journalists that are interested in our story, either to, you know, to do what we're doing now, just, you know, talk talk with us, talk with our producers, or, or even just, you know, share articles that we, you know, that we've published. Exactly. Well, as, you know, you're building a a layer cake. As you said, you know, showing people the same thing in different ways, and through different channels, I think that's that's one of the best ways, to get attention and traction. People don't have huge attention spans sometimes, so being able to provide your vision and your wines and what you're doing in several different ways is definitely gonna be something that helps. So I'm wondering what your goals are for the next five years. You know, you're you're five years in. So in five more years, how do you see you know, Veravino growing, especially in light of all of these debates about, health and alcohol, particularly in wine that have been taking place, you know, a lot of them in the US, you know, considering Italy has always been kind of at the forefront of the Mediterranean diet, which includes wine, you know, how are you gonna shape your message to include your Italian small producers stories and address these other issues that are going to confound our industry in one way or the other. I mean, in general, I feel like we're going along the path that is, a proper path for us. And I should say me, you know, bootstrapping the company, And so, so, certainly, I'm, look looking to get to, breakeven. We were almost there last year and then and then that slowed down that I was talking about actually started, exactly a year ago. And, and so that has, you know, we've had to kind of reign things in. You know, we had, a plan to import much more wine that we have had to kinda dial that back. You know, we still have many, you know, really, delicious, interesting wines to discover as well as olive oils right here in in my warehouse where I am in in Ventura, California. So, anyway, obviously, I'm I'm looking to, grow. So distributors is clearly, a key part of that strategy, just to give you an idea about what we're doing about that. I mentioned before about the, the Corino family, has a Corini is the name of their winery. So I'm gonna be with, with Guido Corino in Massachusetts, in a couple of weeks. And we, we I found a distributor that's interested in, in our wines. And there's a number of trade people with wine stores and restaurants in, on the Boston area that are really interested in in the Corino's wines. So, so that we're gonna be there, doing lunches and and tastings and stuff like that. And in fact, I'm trying to get the word out to really people in in York, Massachusetts, even all around the, let's say, the the northeast. We might even be in Washington DC that the week of, November, November fourteenth. So just doing more of that. And what what's Good. I mean, and what I what I get really excited about is when, in this case, this distributor, Massachusetts called me. And and I happen to come across his, his company and, and immediately he called me up. I'm like, Why is it that I don't know about you guys? So I was just I just got really excited because it's it's really the passion that drives all all supply chain. The passion, you know, of the producers, the passion that we have for an authentic, Farm to glass product, as well as, again, all of the intermediaries along the supply chain to the final the final customer. Another aspect that, of our growth is, is to grow our wine club. And and so we we sell to consumers. We ship around around the US. And, admittedly, it's it's a lower revenue channel of ours. It's funny. Sometimes I'll need a a wine store. I'll have a meeting with a wine store and they'll get a kinda little concerned that, you know, we're selling online so in theory, we could be competing with them. But what I've learned is that wine is a relationship business. And it's not just the b to b. It's also the the b to c. And, and so even consumers they they buy from people they trust that that a lot of times it's it's their their local store or maybe a, you know, a restaurant that they go to that will, you know, that will, where where they'll they'll discover really cool wines. So so with that, we we have a wine club which is, is really geared towards the engaged explorers that we that we target. So once people once a wine, you know, wine engaged, engage explorer consumer, once they get what we do, then, they're they'll they'll become a wine club member. And what happens with that is they'll rely on us to do the curation and then every month or every quarter, then we'll get a delivery of these new wines that they've never tried before. And the third thing that I'd like to do is have some sort of, like, physical presence. So we actually don't have a, you know, we don't have, like, a, a place where the public can come and taste our wine. So so I'd like to also work on that in the future. Well, those are all amazing dreams and and plans that I think are gonna take you on to the next level. The the wine club model, of course, is effective once it gets going. As you said, word-of-mouth and and engaging with people who like to explore and try new things. And I hope you have all the best of luck. And, great time in the future finding a a place of your own to have, you know, as you said, a physical space where you can invite people and do tastings and sort of set down in stone what's in your head and online at the moment. So thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks, Cynthia. It's a great talking to you. Thank you for listening, and remember to tune in next Wednesday when I'll be chatting with another fascinating guest. Italian wine podcast is among the leading wine podcast in the world, and the only one with a daily show. Tune in every day and discover all our different shows. You can find us at Italian wine podcast dot com, SoundCloud, Spotify, Himalaya, or wherever you get your pods.