Behind the Scenes: Launching a Wine Club + a Vineyard Twist
Plus some news on an upcoming wine trip!
This week I want to take you behind the scenes into something that’s been on my heart and in my plans for a long time: launching my own wine club. Plus, I’ll share a quick update on our vineyards in Sardinia.
If you’ve been following me for awhile, like back when I had my wine blog called Palm & Vine, then you know my passion for discovering the lesser known wines of the world runs deep. My rare varieties series covered exactly those wines and it all began with my first trip to Sardinia around seven years ago. It was here on this stunning Mediterranean island where I encountered dozens of grape varieties I, as a budding wine enthusiast, had never even heard of.
Naturally, I felt compelled to share these unique discoveries with strangers on the internet and social media. Over the next several years, wine adventures with my husband (and his jobs) took us around the world to Australia, France, California, and Italy. All the while, I shared these unique wine gems along the way and the more I shared, the more I heard how difficult it was to find wines like these back home in America. And so, the dream of launching my own wine club was born!
I thought, why not bring wines that people can’t get anywhere else to curious wine lovers in America? How hard can it be? Turns out, quite complex!
I’ve been researching like crazy for the past year, putting the pieces together one by one while balancing work and life. Originally, I was planning to base the business in Texas where my family lives because I could have obtained a winery permit there that would have made direct-to-consumer shipping a breeze. Yet upon a deeper dive into the Texas alcohol code, I found a nonsensical requirement that in short, requires me to buy from another permit holder. This was super frustrating to find out after I had already found a Texas warehouse partner and a fulfillment partner for DTC shipping. BUT, better to find out now than after I had already paid for licensing. So, the new plan is to base the business in California because I can obtain the licensing I need without having to work through loopholes to make my business model a reality.
The model: a quarterly rotating wine club of direct imports sourced by me, spotlighting a new wine region with each shipment.
Eventually, we’ll expand into red and white only options, a producer’s club shipment that’s a deep dive on a single producer’s portfolio, ecommerce selections so you can order what you like when you like, annual regional wine trips with club members, and more!
The timing was never really right before because we’ve been moving all over the place, but I’ve been determined to make it happen this year. All of this to say, I hope you’ll join me for the ride, as I plan to share more behind the scenes insights into starting this business here and on social media. And I’ll be looking for input from you, my dear subscribers, to help me shape the wine club offerings.
The Beginning of Something Bigger
I’m calling my import company New Road Selections for a few reasons:
We’re championing lesser known wines and varieties.
We’re spotlighting smaller producers who are passionate about their craft and in touch with the land – no mass produced crap or big box names.
We’re focused only on wines made with organic/sustainable/biodynamic/regenerative practices – wines made with the planet in mind!
We’re disrupting the wine aisle and cutting out the middlemen to bring you high quality wines you can’t find anywhere else at more affordable prices.
I have yet to choose a name for the wine club, though I’m noodling on a few options and will put them to a vote in a newsletter here soon! Right now, I have a sweet little landing page up where you can subscribe and see what New Road Selections will be all about while I work on the website, branding, marketing plan, etc. More coming soon!
And as Sip with Nik subscribers, you’ll be the first to get the scoop on updates anyways. 🧡
I’ll also be launching Instagram & TikTok accounts for the biz, the latter of which will be more unpolished, behind-the-scenes fun, in September.
What I really want to create with this is a big community of wine lovers, opportunities for connection over shared passion, and to make wine fun again!
Over the next few weeks, I will be finishing up the business plan and my master budget so I can apply for my licenses when I come back to the U.S. in late September. I also need to work on my pre-launch marketing plan and get that going while getting producers set up for imports! With all of my travels over these last few years, I’ve already tentatively sourced all of the wines I’ll be including in wine club year one. More on that soon, too. Lots to do!
Sardinian Vineyard Update
Last week, I mentioned that we would be harvesting our mountain site vineyard and, unfortunately, the wild boars harvested it for us.
We were planning to go to the village where our vineyards are last Tuesday to harvest our Arvesiniadu, but my husband’s uncle called us after arriving at the vineyard that morning and there were no grapes to be found! Where a couple days before the vines were full and just about ready to harvest, they were now completely bare. No fruit. Not a single bunch to be found. The wild boars had excavated under our fencing and feasted on our first harvest.
Tragic, yes, and we’re not the only ones this happened to. Our friend, Antonio, in Alghero had 7 hectares completely obliterated by wild boars. Time to go hunting!
Needless to say, we’ll be installing an electric fence.
On the other hand, the valley site where all of our reds are planted will be ready to harvest this weekend. We also installed a sounds machine that plays sounds of predatory birds to keep the birds that like to eat grapes away.
Early last week, we went and sampled the vineyard to measure sugars and estimate when we can harvest.
The sampling process involves trying to get a representative picture of average ripeness by sampling grapes from vines across the vineyard, i.e. in the middle and near the ends of each row sampled. You want to select berries from the top, middle, and bottom of the bunch as well for a cohesive sample.
Next, with samples of each variety collected in little plastic bags, we crushed the grapes and extracted the juice to measure sugar levels using a clever tool called a refractometer.
The refractometer basically measures how much light bends through the grape juice to determine its sugar content. In Italy, Babo is the measurement used. 1°Babo is something like 1.8 grams of sucrose per 100 grams of solution. Other countries call this Baumé, and in America we use Brix. 1 °Brix = 1 gram of sucrose in 100 grams of solution. The bottom line is that these measurements can help you determine the potential alcohol in the finished wine, thus helping you select the right time to harvest based on the style of wine you intend to produce.
We measured our Bovale, Cannonau, and grafted Cannonau separately in the valley vineyard site and determined the following measurements:
Cannonau: 18°Babo (10-11% potential abv)
Bovale: 16°Babo (9-10% potential abv)
Grafted vines: 16.5°Babo ( (9-10% potential abv)
As you can see from the potential alcohol, these grapes still have some maturing to do. There was a bit of rain and cooler temps the week prior which slowed things down a bit. But we should be on track to harvest this weekend since we’ve had warm, sunny days since.
We’re planning to harvest the valley site on Saturday and the family vineyard the day before on Friday. I will be back with post-harvest updates next week!
In Other News…
I was invited on a press trip to Abruzzo in September and I could not be more excited! The trip is hosted by the Consorzio Vini d’Abruzzo and it’s a region I’ve never been to. I'm looking forward to that!
Also, we savored a fabulous bottle of Fatalone Gioia del Colle DOC Primitivo this weekend. Their newest 2024 vintage and it was superb! This was one of the producers I absolutely fell in love with while in Puglia earlier this year and this wine was just as stunning as I remembered.
The Fatalone Primitivo is so vibrant and alive with concentrated flavors of blackberry, blueberry, fragrant violets, and cherries under alcohol with such a balanced and well-integrated palate. Everyone at the table loved this bottle and the wine’s freshness. They couldn’t believe it was a Primitivo from Puglia! Hoping to have some Fatalone wines in the club next year.