Love For The Grape

Remember back in the day when Starbucks was that hip Seattle coffee shop that made sipping java in public the thing to do? No doubt Starbucks is now a behemoth with perceived quality and image problems, but you can’t take away the fact that it changed how many Americans feel about coffee.

Gregg Freishtat sees a time when wine lovers unpretentiously ask their bartender: “What do you have from the Mosel?” Or “You got any domestic tempranillo by the glass?”

Freishtat is the new CEO of The Grape chain of wine bars and shops. By his own admission he does not seem like the first choice to pull this company back from the brink and turn it into a force of change for the American wine palate.

“Other than having no restaurant, wine or food experience, I think I’m perfect for the job,” Freishtat remembers telling the board of directors shortly after steering The Grape out of bankruptcy in 2008. What Freishtat did have going for himself was a sterling track record of molding tech companies, such Telet and VerticalOne, into successful, multi-million dollar businesses.

“The business of building companies is the same,” said Freishtat during an exclusive wine launch event at The Grape’s Vinings’ location in June. “Building a team, taking chances on new, compelling ideas and focusing on execution, that’s what gives you the best chance at success.”

After months of building a new management team and developing compelling ideas, Freishtat seems ready to execute. First up: The Grape’s Wine Discovery Program.

At its core, Wine Discovery is a wine-flight program, where customers get a small pour of three or four wines based on theme. For example, it could be chardonnays from Monterey, Calif., or the wines of the Rhône Valley. Wine Discovery is the flight program gone wild and it touches every corner of the business.

Every month all nine The Grape locations in Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Nevada focus on theme, using four featured wines that express that theme. In July, the focus is on four wines from Sonoma County, two whites and two reds. In conjunction with the Sonoma County theme, the Terlato Wine Group sent Bryan Parker, the winemaker for Sonoma’s Alderbrook Winery, to debut his new line, Hideaway Creek. For the entire month of July, The Grape is the only place you can Hideaway Creek wines.

Freishtat could barely conceal his appreciation for Terlato’s participation in the Wine Discovery Program. Every month the theme changes and Freishtat will promote special events that reinforce the four featured wines. “We will bring in wineries and distributors to support our efforts,” Freishtat said. “They must commit to such thing as visits by winemakers, like Bryan Parker, or bringing in barrel samples or other unique events.”

While Freishtat is grateful for the largesse of distributors and winery groups now, he envisions a time when they vie mightily for a place in The Grape’s program. “Right now, there are $30 billion in domestic wine sales and there is no domestic, national brand for on-premise wine sales,” Freishtat says. “We want to create that national brand.”

Of course, that means unwinding a lot of regulations governed by each state. At the moment, The Grape in each state may focus on Sonoma County wines, but they may be from different wineries depending on which wines are allowed to be sold in each state. Accustomed to unraveling legal balls of yarn, Freishtat, who has a law degree from University of Maryland, hopes to eventually keep all the locations reading of the same page.

The Wine Discovery Program puts a spotlight on the featured wine in the café and in the adjacent wine shop, but it also drives employee training. Instead of expecting low-wage servers to memorize the vast expanse of the wine universe, they can focus on four wines and get a little background on the region. Little by little, the staff gets a better grasp of wine and help guests understand the story behind the wine.

A subtle-but-key component to Wine Discovery is something called “the splash.” It has nothing to do with puddles or diving boards; it’s a gift of sorts. When you sit down at The Grape, your server will offer you a “splash” (about an ounce and half) of one of the four featured wines for free. Customers can order the splash wine or something else.

“We are finding that people are now ordering flights of all four of the featured wines off of that splash,” Freishtat said. “Thirty to 40 percent of people who take the splash, buy the wine.”

Often, these are wines outside most people’s comfort zone that they would never order or ask the server about, even though they are very curious. “People do not want to be lectured to,” Freishtat said. “But, they want more knowledge than they’re willing to say.”

Next on Freishtat’s to-do list is harmonize the food program with the symphony that is the Wine Discovery Program.

“We scrapped the chef’s specials because they really didn’t support our Wine Discovery format,” Freishtat said. Eventually, the kitchen will serve small bites that pair nicely with the wines or are from the region where the wines are made. “We want to have people saying: ‘I don’t like pinot [noir], but if I had pinot with this food, I might try pinot more often.’”

With “more than seven figures invested in the turnaround,” Freishtat is wagering a lot on satisfying consumers’ growing interest in wine. But as sure as “Give me a triple vente mocha” easily rolls off the tongues of millions of American coffee lovers today, Freishtat is betting that orders like “I’ll have a xinomavro with my braised lamb” won’t be too far away at The Grape.

Don’t tell Gregg, but retired people are not supposed to
be this busy. Guess you could have worse retirement jobs, right?