ABOUT US

PHILOSOPHY

Our goal is a simple one: to connect passionate producers making honest, authentic wines, spirits, and ciders with equally passionate customers.  We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or revolutionize the business. We’re proudly plying a trade filled with a rich history that dates back millennia. Achieving our goal comes down to building strong personal relationships with three important groups: our customers, our producers, and our employees.  It’s pretty simple really – carefully select producers for the long-term, go above and beyond what customers, both in the trade as well as individual consumers, expect, and build a company culture based around employee enthusiasm and well-being.

As far as our wine & spirits philosophy goes, you’ll be disappointed if you were hoping to find a grand, dogmatic manifesto here. Where we are dogmatic is in demanding the absolute highest quality in all our wines & spirits, regardless of price point.  That’s not to say we don’t have our own strong opinions on them, but we realize that wines and spirits are far too complex to break down into black and white issues and have learned that pretty much every time we think we know something to be certain, something will come along and shatter whatever notion we had.  In short, we try to keep an open-mind while staying true to what we believe in.  Also sometimes we can get too caught up in the details and forget to see wines & spirits for what they are on their most basic and fundamental level: something meant to bring people together, rather than apart, and bring happiness to those who consume it.

So what is it that we do believe in? Here is our mini-manifesto (wine and otherwise).  Our portfolio is centered around 1) small producers that are passionate about the wines, spirits, and ciders they’re making and 2) authentic, honest beverages that express their terroir.  Thing we love in wine: high acidity, minerality, balanced alcohol levels, quirky, off-beat, and oft-overlooked wines that make the wine world such an interesting place, traditional winemaking that preserves the ways of the past as well as young upstarts daring to be different.  Other things we love: East Coast oysters, negronis, mezcal, ramen, Kölsch beer, 90s Hip-Hop, and the Cincinnati Bengals (note: this is only Eric, nobody else in the company would willingly support the Bengals despite repeated requests). Things we don’t love: excessive new oak, ripeness or manipulation, wines with no sense of place, sharks, Mitch McConnell, and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

We are big believers in wines being made with as little manipulation as possible, and our portfolio focuses on natural, organic, and biodynamic wines.  Here, again we take a simple approach: not only are these wines better for us but time and time again we’ve found that these producers make wines that taste better than their conventionally farmed counterparts.  For spirits we take a similar approach and work with actual human beings making these beverages and not with “brands”.

We realize that not everyone is going to see things exactly as we do and that’s okay.  The myriad opinions and tastes in the wine & spirits world are what make it such an exciting place.  We’re grateful just to play a role in connecting our amazing producers with our amazing customers (and especially grateful to do this for a living).  We hope you like what we do, but we’re always looking for ways to improve, so drop us a line and tell us what you like, or more importantly, what you think we could be doing better.

Thank you,

OUR TEAM

Eric Clemons

Founder

Gabe McNeil

New York Sales

Hannah Miller

New York Sales

John Livingston

New Jersey Sales

John McCarroll

New York Sales

Kate Miller

Westchester & Hudson Valley Sales

Mariel Goddu

New York & New Jersey Sales

Misaki Reinoso

Director of Operations

Thomas Crowley

New York Sales