7/12/2020

Why we decided to start a winery.

Why did Metas Altas decide to start? New businesses can be expensive to start up, and very time consuming. In addition, they can take years or longer to see a return on your initial investment. That’s only if the business owners have the gumption to stick it out for that long anyway. Another red flag is the sheer amount of many wineries in California (4,613 according to one source) to compete with. It’s like there’s a book out there encouraging them, or something. This competition makes it tough to stand out, and turns our (collectively) beloved wine into an increasingly interchangeable commodity. In economics, wine is often classified in tiers of pricing: $1 - $10; $11 - $20; $21 -$30, and so forth. Sadly, it’s just the way the market (us human consumers) largely buys its wine.

Before I start thinking ‘What have we done?’ I want to move forward to some positive notes. The actual reasons on why I’m even in the position of writing this, is because I wanted a challenge. I wanted to succeed in a tough playing field. I wanted to find something to be passionate about, and to put my full effort into it. Metas Altas, means ‘High Goals’ after all. Beyond that, starting my own wine business was a way to enhance my non-entrepreneurial career in the wine industry. By creating my own wine company, I am now able to say that I know what it takes to navigate creating and maintaining social media accounts, a website, art design and branding, as well as meeting and learning from first-hand, the behind the scenes people I need to reach out to in order to make things happen.  Sure, this comes with less fun responsibilities as well, like obtaining and maintaining licensing, federal, state, and local taxes, warehousing, generating leads and fulfilling sales, but ultimately a good manager needs to know and understand all the machinations of their industry.

Some more fun comes from the ability to show off your product to friends and family, but that pales in comparison to showing off and making sales to retailers and complete strangers. This is the test which shows you if you’ve got it or not. Unfortunately, you’re going to meet people who simply don’t like your wine. These can be low points if you let them, but alternatively they can be seen as opportunities to rebound and to challenge yourself further. For instance, I can’t recall the amount of times I’ve been ghosted by retailers who took a sample bottle from me, but weren’t interested enough to call me back. This challenged me continue further, and knock on more doors, and meet new wine buyers, and eventually, make the sales that I knew were out there.  

Lastly, I just love wine and the romance and history which comes with it, and I always wondered what my own story would be. ‘What would I put on the back of my label?’ is something I used to ask myself when I was behind the bar, loosening the hinge on my new wine key. Now, I can’t exactly speak for my partners’ motives, but it’s certainly true for me.

What would you put on the back of your wine bottle?

-Gabe