Meeting with James Barrett

Meeting with James Barrett

Date: 2/1

Title: Finance Worker at JP Morgan, responsible for financing vineyards

Notes

• “I cannot tell you how much of a problem this is” and was talking about how it’s impossible for restaurants to find new wines because the industry is so manual but there’s a serious interest in restaurants diversifying their list
• WineDirect -- He said they weren’t that good although he said the last time he heard of them was 5 years ago. Although it’s worth mentioning wine direct seems primarily built around wine clubs which is direct to consumer (D2C)
• He said you have a few suppliers which only deal with large wineries because deals are so manual that it takes a list of man power cost to get something going with a winery, so it doesn’t make sense to spend the money to form a relationship with a winery that won’t ship that much volume
• He also said that if you can more heavily automate this process, a natural exit would be getting acquired by one of these distributors
• He was like “restaurants would want to say ‘I want a wine with x features and sell it with this cut of steak at this price range’ and get a list of options”
• He made it seem like the difficulty in making connections is largely in finding a wine that fits your specific needs
• He said in the past it was people who’s job is to go around trying wines and coordinating deals and now it’s largely a few big distributors because it’s easier for the restaurants that only deal with the large wineries because it’s economically efficient for the producers
• In terms of game plan: have a deal with distributors that we can let them cheaply find small wineries