Gearing up for summer!

March is around the corner and marks a very exciting month in the wine business. Marge is scheduling musicians for Music on the Patio which will be every Saturday from 4-7pm. We've all been busy brainstorming ideas for Ladies Day which will be Thursdays, and finding recipes/caterers for Tapas night on Fridays. We also changed up the gift shop a little bit by building a new checkout counter and tasting bar. We will be adding some chalkboards to advertise events and are updating our wine club information (one set price). It's a pretty exciting time at the winery as we look forward to our fourth summer open!

On the wholesale side, we are gearing up for tastings! Restaurants typically search for wines for their spring/summer wine lists in March. So letters are being sent out to prospects, meetings set up with current and potential customers, and the 2009 wine portfolio was just printed! It's an exciting time, but a stressful time. If we sit back and watch the month pass by we could potentially be out of the game until August.

Lisa and I attended the UP Show (Upper Midwest Foodservice and Lodging Show) on Monday. We made some good connections, so hopefully we get some business! It's always good to just get our name out there. The event was held in Minneapolis and 3 other distributors and 3 wineries were sampling their juice as well. There are about 50 wine distributors in the Metro area, so there's a lot of competition. What sets us apart? We are a family business; we are the importer and distributor (cut out the middleman); we personally visit the vineyards and hand select the wines we want to import; many of the wines are small production and hand harvested making for high quality; and we treat our customers like family.