When you're a startup company you have to accumulate a lot of small victories to build your business successfully. That's what we're doing, account by account.
Babbo -- recently Luca Pasquinelli at this flagship Mario Batali restaurant ordered our Aleatico dessert wine, Nanerone from Piandibugnano. He's serving it as part of a tasting menu and told a colleague at another Batali place that it was going over very well. I believe that's true, because suddenly I started seeing a lot of searches on that wine coming from affluent locales all over the New York metro area.
Hearth -- Paul Grieco has just ordered two of Domenico Selections wines at this highly regarded East Village restaurant. If you go there, look for Angelarosa Greco di Tufo and Reale Borgo di Gete.
On the retail side, our I Stefanini Soaves seem to be a hit at Aulden Cellars, the UES retail outlet of Sotheby's.
Again on the Upper East Side, there's K&D, a well-regarded store that's also taken a shine to I Stefanini.
It's interesting to see which wines are "restaurant" wines and which are "retail." We sort of predicted that, based not only on price point but on the differentness of the wine: the more unusual, the more it tends to be a restaurant wine. In other words, a good sommelier will train the staff to hand-sell the wine with an eye to exactly the right pairings. Some of the DS wines are quite "different" from the usual offerings, so this sort of commitment is essential to our success as well as the restaurant's.
I'm happy to say that several of our imports have turned out to be both restaurant and retail wines. We'll see how it plays out with the wines that are soon to make their debut.
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