Dry Farm Wines - Todd White - Pt. 3

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.

We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines. So having strict guidelines for your wine, how did you come up with the wineries? How did you select them? Because you just can’t go to Google and find these wineries. In the natural wine business. There are very specific subsections of the wine industry. It’s tiny, very, very small. And so everybody basically knows everyone else. There are natural wine fairs, about 50 of them. There are three in the United States, but there is about 50 across Europe. And so we attend all of these natural wine fairs. We’re not right now, but historically we have. Now, today, we’re the largest buyer and seller of natural wines in the world by multiple of probably 25 X, maybe more than that. So we’re internationally known, you know, as a buyer. Now, in the beginning, when I started the company, there were probably about 40 natural wine importers in the United States, meaning that all they sell are natural wine. Like in San Francisco. There are two natural wine bars I’m sorry, three now. They’re just activists. Right. Like, you just wouldn’t have a non-natural wine in there. It’s just not it’s a it’s a revolution. There are three, arguably only three natural wine retailers in San Francisco. Right. And they’re very small stores. So in the beginning, you know, I started reaching out to natural wine importers. I discovered this importer in Paris and American his name’s Josh Adler, who used to live in San Francisco and he moved to Paris and he started a national wine importing company into the United States. And he was the first one that discovered he owns a company called Paris Wine Company. We’re probably his largest customer today, I would imagine. But we do a lot of business with them. But in the beginning, I contacted him to learn about sort of the natural wine world. I began to uncover and discover people and get referred to other importers who specialize in natural wines. Now, today, we’re the largest importer of natural wines in the world. So we still work with about 80 importers today. But we also import directly our own wines. And we do that. We have normally this time of year, we would have four to six people on the ground spread across Europe right now, buying wines that normally we would spend the first six months of the year in Europe buying wines.

So you’ve got the sourcing figured out. So now comes the part on what to present to the customer, right? Well, we don’t sell wine by the bottle. We do custom curation for people. So. So every single box that our member gets is different and has different wines. And oh, no, we have wines that are requested. We also do customer fulfillment and specialize in fulfillment. And if somebody loves the bottle, they’ll, you know, write to us and want to potentially buy more or something similar to it. You know, Pinot Noir is probably our number one requested grape. But the interesting thing about us is because we deal with these small family farms and ancestral grape varietals around the world. Americans generally know the top eight with Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot blanc, Pinot noir. But we sell hundreds of varietals that people have never heard of Schiava from Italy or, you know, Pino Dune from Loire Valley or, you know, many of these obscure ancestral grapes that people never heard of. So they wouldn’t know what to order. And then when we curate their box and they get this custom curated box, they order red white rosé sparkling and then we choose what goes in the box for them. So they’re getting this global, all these great varieties these are never heard of and they love and they get to experience, sort of like traveling around the wine countries of Europe. Right. And so if they were just going to order wine and order, you know, if they live in California, they want red wine, they’d probably water mellow cabernet sauvignon or Pinot Noir because that’s all the red wines they know. Right. They would know to order Schiava from Italy, which is lighter and fresher than a Pinot Noir, you know, or Pinot Dune, which is also like a very, very light and fresh version of Pinot that they just wouldn’t know. They get a lot of education just by allowing us to curate for them.

I see on the website there’s a 100 percent happiness guarantee. Tell me about that. Yeah, we also have a 100 percent happiness guarantee. Any bottle. You don’t love will replace it. No questions asked. You don’t have to send it back. You can drink it. I don’t care what you do. Would you tell us you didn’t like it? We’ll send you. We’ll give you a refund or send you another bottle. That is a 100 percent happiness guarantee. That concludes our. Interview with Todd White, founder of Dryfarmwines.com

Thank you for listening. I’m Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best 5 Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHSYM. If you like the show tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time, pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.

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