Skip to Content

Blog

The adventures of #TeamLieb. Everything we're into, drinking, eating and talking about.
Lieb Behind the Scenes

Lieb Behind the Scenes – April 2015

April 8, 2015

IMG_5014

There’s a lot of romance surrounding wineries. We talk about our beautiful vistas, peaceful walks in the vineyard and laughter in our tasting rooms. We post ethereal photos of our barrel room and tell you that our winemaker is an artist, masterfully hand-crafting award-winning blends. Vineyard life is sometimes this magical, and I find myself frequently thinking about how lucky I am to be a part of it. But, the truth is, more often than not there’s a lot happening behind the scenes that isn’t romantic. Like the pipes freezing and flooding our estate house in February. Or our boxed wine filler breaking 5 times before we could get it to properly work last year and almost scrapping all together the whole idea of selling boxed wine. Or the drought stress that forced us to nervously scramble to pick some of our grapes earlier than we wanted to last year. There’s a lot that happens that’s stressful, un-pretty and less than flattering. It’s all of the stuff that we typically don’t tell you about. Until now.

This is my first blog in a new series that we are titling “Lieb Behind the Scenes.” You may ask, why? Why would we purposefully pull down the proverbial curtain and reveal our innermost workings when most wineries spend thousands, even millions, of dollars on marketing to create and preserve the illusion of romance? Well, because, we’re not one of those wineries. At Lieb, we’re not about fancy tasting rooms, grand-sounding wine names, or a big story about how our owners always wanted to live among the vines. Our tasting room is a converted metal barn, our wines are named by their varietal and we’re owned by a bunch of shareholders. And, we like it that way. Our company, like our wines, is honest and straightforward. No pretense. And we think that sets us apart.

So, here it goes. April 2015:

Spring! FINALLY. Make no mistake about it, this was a loooong winter. Persistent snow storms for 3 months straight made 2 things particularly difficult. First, pruning. In an average winter, pruning the vines (to control growth the next season) means hours and hours AND HOURS of laborious, repetitive work on each and every vine (84 acres worth of vines!) in often freezing temps. Pruning during this past winter also meant working through 4 foot high snow drifts. We bought our vineyard crew new coveralls and boots in an effort to keep them warm, but still, it was pretty brutal out. The guys that do this work for us day after day deserve mention. They’re loyal and hard-working, and without them, the Long Island wine industry simply wouldn’t be possible.

Second, slow tasting room traffic. Although a timely feature on News 12 in February brought new faces and a boost in sales last month, January and February were quieter than last year. We don’t blame you. We didn’t want to leave our houses either. But now that April is here, our outdoor furniture and fire pits are back on the deck on Oregon Road and this weekend’s forecast is calling for mid-50’s, we’ll be expecting your visit. Get out here!

At the winery, spring is when we bottle white wines from the past vintage (2014) and red wines from 2 vintages ago (2013). And for us, “bottling” actually means bottling/kegging/boxing. This may seem like a simple exercise: take wine from barrels and tanks and put them into bottles. Believe me, it’s not. When I see finished wine moving down the bottling line all labelled and capped, I breathe a HUGE sigh of relief. Because a finished wine means that months and months of work to quantify, quote, order and coordinate the delivery of every glass bottle, label, screw cap, cardboard box, keg, keg label, keg cap, cork, wirehood, bag, and outer shipper (collectively called “dry goods’) has all – finally – come together. And it wasn’t screwed up! Phew. With 4 seasons of dry goods ordering under my belt, I consider myself pretty good at it at this point, and everything is running smoothly so far. The only hiccup is our custom screw caps from France for our 2013 Lieb reds were majorly delayed and we had to pay an extra $500 to get enough air freighted to fill a distributor order a few weeks ago. I stressed over it and yelled at our sales rep (nicely, over email :)) every day until they arrived, and (literally) had nightmares about the distributor truck showing up and us not having wine for them. All of the planning, budgets and timelines in the world can’t prevent against every delay or mishap. One of these seasons I’ll learn to accept that.

Speaking of distributors, that’s the last part of our business that I’d like to discuss for this post – wholesale. In addition to being a bottling month, April is also the month that a lot of restaurants are getting their wine lists set for spring/summer. You may have this romanticized notion that the “farm to table” movement has created widespread demand for local wines, and that we have restaurants calling us up every day asking if they could add us to their wine lists. The truth is, it’s really hard selling wine. And it’s even harder selling local (NY) wine. Because we’re all small relative to most producers outside our region and aren’t able to achieve the same economies of scale (Lieb makes about 12,000 cases of wine per year, the average CA winery makes 130,000), our wines are on the expensive side in comparison to many wines from other parts of the world. So, not only do we need to convince accounts to support NY/local (as opposed to a more well-known region like Napa or Burgundy), we have to convince them to spend more. AND, to choose Lieb over the other 400+ NY wine producers.

Prior to 2014, we employed our own internal group of sales people to call on retailers and restaurants, and they did a pretty good job. Unfortunately, when you factored in their salaries, expenses, health insurance and the cost of wine, it was near impossible for us to make money no matter how many cases they sold. So last year we decided to move to a distributor model. Our distributor has 50 sales reps in NY (as opposed to our 5), and we don’t have pay their expenses – score! But, they also have 300+ brands in their portfolio, which means we’re fighting for the reps’ attention every step of the way and are extremely lucky if they put our wine in their bag 1 in every 10 times that they go out selling. Damned if we self-distribute, damned if we don’t! Admittedly, this past year was rough. We doubted our decision every time we got a disappointing sales report from our distributor. We kept pushing, though, and supporting them with a kick @ss brand ambassador (yeah Madison!), marketing programs, social media, tasting events and POS materials, and last month we seemed to finally turn the corner. They (we) got a lot of orders, A LOT. And one of their reps even got our Blanc de Blancs on the list at the very exclusive Polo Lounge in NYC, something we likely never would’ve been able to achieve on our own. A good March, however, certainly doesn’t guarantee a good April. So we keep pushing…

Romantic and glamorous? Yes. Tough, challenging and stressful? Also, yes. Stay tuned for next month when I’ll tackle wine club – why most wineries (really) have clubs and the consummate issue of retention.

Til then, cheers! (me with a glass 2014 Bridge Lane Rosé of course)

Ami Opisso
General Manager & Certified Sommelier, Lieb Cellars

10% Off

All online orders of 12+ bottles of wine.