Armenia has the benefit of having a really rich set of story pieces, you know, content pieces that we get to work with, both from the ancient history of it and how the geopolitical evolution of Armenia as an independent
republic has now led to this renaissance of winemaking. And that is now being brought forward by mainly diaspora Armenians, which are, you know, Armenians coming from other parts of the world, but committing their time and energy and moving their families to Armenia to be a part of this movement. Those are beautiful stories, and those are actually representative of the way Armenians operate broadly. Sit back and grab a glass. It's Wine Talks with Paul Kay.
Hey, welcome to Wine Talks with Paul Kay. And we are in studio today about to have a conversation with Zach Arman, president and chief bottle washer of Storica wines here in America. Introductions in just a minute. Hey, have a listen to the Cheval Blanc interview I did a couple months ago with Monsieur Clouet, the director, which they do in Bordeaux, the directors of the winery, the winemaker. Incredibly philosophical conversation about winemaking in that part of the world as
well, not just up the road in cognac. We had a conversation with Delimont, and this is a boutique cognac house. And since we're going to talk about Armenian wines today and Armenian brandy, this is the traditional cognac part of the world, which makes brandy. Have a listen to that. Hey, give us a review. If you don't have something good to say, don't say it at all. But if you have something nice to say, this is what keeps our egos going in the podcasting world. And please subscribe on
your way out. But now, while we're here, here to talk to Zach, an old friend. We've had a lot of conversations in the wine world, but welcome to the show. Thank you, Paul. Thank you for having me. And it's great to join your show after all these years. Well, thank you. Of fun work together. It's an amazing. Dozens of people will hear this. So we're where. But you came out. Did you come out just to hang out and, you know, see what's going on or you were doing a little
work before we got started? You know, the clock's still ticking back there. What? Yeah, no, this is. I actually was doing something for my day job. Soroka has. Has never really been my. My job. It's been a passion and it's been a side project now for six years. But I have always had a day job, which I've tried to balance, and I've done a so, so job. But I'm lucky to have a really great
team of people at Storica who really do all the hard work. I am, I am certainly the chief bottle washer officer, as you named me in the intro. So I'm going to read from your. Cheerleader as, I mean, look, we all. Know that bottle washer part. I just went and got a glass of water. I'm going to read from your October 22 to October 2022 overview of Storka. It looks like a fundraising document. Yeah. But you talk about Armenian wine and, and Storka
is the Armenian wine importer and distributor. Right. So let's get that on the table. But Armenian wine is gaining momentum. Armenia is becoming a resident wine region and we have positioned Storka Wines to become the market's leader in the U.S. i mean, this is a tall order. And we talked about this early on when you started doing this, but what was that vision for? What was the passion about? And, you know, what keeps you going? Yeah. Did you have your head examined? I
probably should have before I started this company. Now, this was a passion that I, I thought of or I, I really met the right people to think of back in 2017. So I've been going to Armenia pretty often over the last 15 or 16 years. My father, Garo, started a charity that's based in armenia back in 2002 called the children of Armenia Fund,
which has a lot of work in rural communities of Armenia. And so that being being close to the charity since it was founded, me and my family would go to Armenia every year pretty regularly, sometimes twice a year. And so it gave me the chance to create a network in Armenia. And what I wound up doing back in 2017 was meeting Vahe and Amy Kushkarian, who I know you know well, Paul. And you've spent a lot of time with Vahe.
Yes, good friend. And they, I met them on a, on a friendly basis, not, not with any belief that I would start a business around, around wine. But I, I did notice on that trip in 2017 that there was a pretty rapid ascent and a rapid presence rather of, of Armenian wine in Yerevan, whereas I hadn't noticed that in prior years. And it was really interesting to me that, that this was happening so
quickly. And when I started asking around, you know, what, what is it all of a sudden that's making Armenian wine a thing, I realized very quickly that it was really a renaissance or a resurgence. It wasn't something new and rediscovery of our ancient tradition in winemaking. That, that dates back over 6,000 years to, to the Adeni 1 cave which was, which was excavated back in 2011 and 2012.
And while many countries claim to be the first region or country to have produced wine, the fact is that Armenia was the first country where a, a facility for winemaking was ever discovered. There were seeds discovered in China and Georgia that were wine grape seeds. And there was clearly some ad hoc production being done of wine per those discoveries. But there was no facility that was clearly being used to produce wine at some, in some scaled fashion before the irony one cave was
discovered. So Armenia has been the birthplace or one of the birthplaces of wine. And when I discovered in this 2017 trip that I took was that now as Armenia has become an independent Republic from the 90s and, and has rediscovered many of its old industries, wine being one of them, that really over the last seven or eight years has there been enough of a, of a infrastructure built in the country to produce wine so that people like me who are visiting the country
notice that all of a sudden there is some really high quality wine. I'm going to stop there for a second. Coming out, what you said just now is like the whole thing in a nutshell is. No, it's important stuff. I'm trying to bury the lead. But there's a but. There's a but. There's something very important that's buried in what you just said because all those are important
facts. And this is a very tough industry, as we've discovered, trying to bring wine, not only wine to America and then compete against, you know, the traditional regions of the world and America, California wine too. But buried in what you said, you were there 2017. Had you been there prior to 2017? Oh, yeah, every year since really 2005, 2006. So you, you've seen a rad change in, I mean we were there in 2007, wouldn't drink the wine, wouldn't really consume anything. No. And then the
food was all kebab and vegetables wherever way it went. And all of a sudden now we were there last year, you know, 2024, twice. And it's like I tell people, it's like Paris, except for the architecture and the sort of the culture. But as far as how you feel walking around, the restaurant selections, the wine selections, the ambiance, the safety factor, you feel good? Oh yeah. Walk around, very safe country, very safe place. You've seen how slow wine is to, to get traction, to establish
yourself, to build a brand. And I'm trying to understand how did we get. So how did the acceleration of the worldwide recognition of Armenian wine happen so fast? You're talking about 27:17 Stork has a lot to do with this story, but it's also part of a bigger picture. Yeah, because that doesn't happen. Yeah, it's a good question. And we've, we've explored this question because we want to build our business around
value proposition. Right. Not to use cliche management terminology, but, you know, we, we've sat there and said, okay, what is it that needs to be the calling cards or messages that we send to the consumer to get them to want to try the wine? And, and those relate to what you're talking about, which is why there has been actually a pretty rapid ascent of these wines. One of the reasons is because they're just sort of the raw material of the terroir of
Armenia. The, the, the land, the soil, the, the vines themselves. The, the fact that many of these vines are being produced at extremely high elevation, which is always a good thing for, for high quality winemaking wines are more complex as they are exposed to, to rapid fluctuations in climate, because that, that causes the plant to exude various different defense mechanisms and nutrients, and those wind up showing in the complexity of the flavor and the aroma of the
wine. Right. So that's just a pure function of Armenia's land and soil and climate. But somebody has to get that into the bottle. Someone has somebody to buy it and taste it. That's right. So that's the second piece. So there's the raw material, then there's the, there's the craftsman. Right. There are these winemakers who have come to Armenia, and while they've adopted some of our ancient traditions, their winemaking style is very modern and is very akin to the winemaking
styles of California and France and Italy. And that's unique to these sort of, I'll call them niche regions like Georgia and Greece and Moldova, where they have not really changed much about their winemaking production style from what was done many generations ago. The benefit of the new age Armenian winemaker is they were able to see, you know, what does the Western palate want? They want clean, cleanly made wine with a complexity and flavor and aroma with just quality and
new technology. And that's what the Armenian winemakers did. They brought in consultants from all these well known regions. Many of them taught themselves in a lot of ways how to make modern wine. And so you have this really beautiful blend of an ancient tradition of wine and, and those ancient vines and, and lands that are in Armenia with a very modern and western oriented style of winemaking. And that combo
makes for a really great product. Well, I went to a tasting, a biodynamic tasting not too long ago and I went to the Georgian table and there were two completely styles of wine. There was that old school, musty, you know, stinky shoe type wine, which is the traditional wine. Yeah. And then there was the modern take on wine, which, you know, in my opinion that, that is just the cyclical part of wine. It's a consumer product. It's always been driven by consumerism
and so whatever the public wants. But it's, it's not the romantic side of wine. Right. Romantic side of wine is what you're talking about, which is balancing what the soil's giving us, what the vine's giving us and that the winemaker is maximizing the value of that, of that expression. Right. And that's what comes out. And here's an
example. Right. Your, our mutual friend Josh called me the other day and he says, you know, my friends are just drinking Silver Oak and cus and Josh and all this stuff from the supermarkets. I want to move on. And I went to a dinner the other night with my boss and, and he chose a wine and I was interested to know what that was about. And I'm thinking that's the kind of client. Yeah. That has a curiosity to what's going on out there. How are you finding these people? Well, that's what we figured
out with Storica. We, you know, you aspire to sell a lot of wine and you aspire to sell wine into high quality locations. Right. Which you know, we can rattle off any one of these places you'd want to see your wine. You want to see it in a Whole Foods, you want to see it in a major restaurant group like major food
group. Right. That's what you aspire to in, in hypothetical terms, but in practical terms there are, there's a customer set that's looking for the kind of wine that Armenia, that Armenia offers and there' also geographies and markets that are looking for that and that's not necessarily the, the major markets. The LA is the New Yorks of the world, the Miamis of the world. It's some of these second tier markets where we're
seeing a lot of success. Peri. Urban locations around Boston, not necessarily in Boston, but some of the towns and cities around it. We're in places like, like Nashville, Tennessee, Birmingham, Alabama, Omaha, Nebraska. Oh, Nashville would be a natural place for Armenian wine. Of course. Country bars, you wouldn't think so. Right. But in these places you do have high quality restaurants that are, you know, that's true. Attended by people
who want to experience something that is high quality. They're more willing to try something new because they have less of a, I'll call, preconceived notion about what regions produce good wine versus not, which you typically get, I'll say, in more of the snobby markets around the country. So while in the beginning of our efforts at Storico were, hey, we just got to be in the big major markets and we got to fight to get placements at the
best restaurants, we've realized that's not really the answer. The answer is don't, don't pigeonhole into, into the major markets. Look at all the markets. There's plenty of people in, in, in markets like, you know, Birmingham and Omaha and we're around
Raleigh, Durham in North Carolina. These are large population centers and we were able to create footholds because for some reason the consumers in those places are wanting something different and they don't have this belief system that only French, Italian and California. That's a really good point. That's a really good point. Well, of course there's Lincoln, Nebraska, the phenom Armenian basketball star ain or something. Yeah, maybe we could do an NL deal with him. Once he's 21, then
we can, then we can contact him. So how many states are you in now? We sold wine. Actually checked this today. We sold wine in 26 states in 2024. That's amazing. Now you're talking about 2017 and you got organized and, and, and funded the company in 2019. 20. 2020 was really that, that is an. Amazing ascent to be into, especially as a side hustle, so to
speak. Thank you. To get into that many states with the logistic issues, as I've always said that they never repealed Prohibition, they just broke it up into 50 different pieces. That's very true. From our, I mean really, that's quite phenomenal. Well, I got lucky. We got lucky as a company. So I, I'm not a wine person and I'm not a, I'm not a CPG person. I've never lived in this industry. What kind of person are you? That's why you're here.
It's very philosophical. I started my career in finance, so I worked on Wall street for six years at Goldman Sachs. So one of the evil empires. Yeah, right. But it was a great experience because it taught me how to think about a business from Its real sort of most important component parts. You know, what's a profit and loss statement, What's a balance sheet, What's a cash flow statement? How do you think about those financial
components of a business? In any business that you're looking to form, it doesn't matter what industry you're in, you need to worry about are you generating revenue and do you have enough cash to grow that revenue base and are you losing too much money because of your expenses? That applies to anything. So I got those sort of building blocks while I was on Wall street and then I went and did my MBA at MIT Sloan up in the Boston area, which got me a lot of exposure to the,
the tech and innovation industries. You know, Boston's very, very well known for computer science and for biotechnology and then and the life sciences. And so while at Sloan, I got very into sustainability and low carbon economy, AKA agriculture and energy systems. So my agriculture lean kind of got me into. How do I look at Armenia as a place that I always wanted to try to find a way to make an impact, just given the background that I grew up with Coaf with a charity that my father
founded. I took a agriculturally focused lens to where can I help make an impact in Armenia? And so I spent some time looking at can we make higher value commodities or higher value products out of some of the commodities that are being produced in Armenia? Berries, let's say, being turned into jams and other and other processed foods. And so that got me sort of close to the wine world. It didn't get
me into it until I made this, this trip in 2017. But when I went in 2017 and I got a chance to meet Vahe and Amy and they explained to me this sort of renaissance that was occurring in wine, I was, I had a little bit of that predisposition to wanting to do something to impact Armenia in a, in an industry that was akin to agriculture, which wine obviously straddles agriculture, it straddles manufacturing and it straddles tourism, which is one of the big
things or cases for why countries want to drive economic development in wine. Because it touches those three core areas of economic development and most other products or industries don't touch all three. They'll touch one or two of those. So that got me compelled to do something. And that something certainly was not storica in the first instance. It was more of, hey, this wine's
good. Are you guys selling it in the U.S. well, not really. We're kind of like Baja was self importing and calling buddies of his from his days as a distributor in the 90s to try to help him out. And it was a very passive, small, ad hoc effort, I would say. And so I said, okay, well, I don't know the first thing about importing wine or selling wine, but I know this is a good product, it has a great story and it could really impact Armenia in a lot of valuable ways. So
let's figure out what that can be. And I wound up spending the next six months just bothering and pestering Vi and Amy on zoom calls, just, you know, keeping them up till 11:12pm their time and, you know, sitting in a conference room in my old job in Boston, just peppering them with questions. You know, Vahe came here years ago, I forgot why. And I did a podcast with him and he walked in and I looked at him and he looked
at me and he says, we know each other. And when he was running the restaurant in Berkeley, he needed Gallo Chardonnay, the Sonoma, Gallo Sonoma, for a wedding, for his niece's wedding. It was in la and he didn't know where to get it. And however he got my name, I have no idea. I don't even know why I had the wine in stock. And we became, I bought it from him, we did business together. I'm like, what? That is wild. And he, I
think I tell people this all the time. I think he's one of those brilliant winemakers in the world. Not philosophically grounded. The experience, it all adds up to like one of the, one of the great conversations. And you saw the footage we just shot is, it's just compelling to listen to what he does. And so you're learning
from one of the best. But you know, this. There's a big difference between, you know, MIT business school, where you learn, you know, academically, what, what's right and then hit the streets in a heavily controlled environment with a heavily controlled product. Did that surprise you? Like when you got, got your, put your toe in the water, you went, oh my God. I didn't realize this is what it's about. I didn't realize how hard it would be to get
us based consumers to embrace wine. I didn't realize how long it would take, you know, that this wine in any, with any region is really a 15, 20 year sort of buildup phase. It doesn't matter how good the product is, it doesn't matter how interesting the story is. And I just assumed, okay, the product is good enough, it's at a good enough price point to where we should get it out into as into as many hands and mouths as.
As possible. Quickly. And I just thought, okay, as long as we get it out there and we spend enough money to get it out there, we'll get a good enough conversion rate to, to build a great business, which sounds really nice in theory. You forgot to say the margins suck. The margins are terrible. You. The cash flow is awful. I've had to continue to lean on my very generous and very patient investors to fund the business. Those parts I didn't think would be as painful. I had
a guess they'd be painful. But the parts that I really didn't appreciate until the last couple of years was this just really is a slow burn, like wine is a slow burn. It just takes time to get people comfortable, to get people's light bulbs to turn on, so to speak. But it's coming. It's coming and we know that the product is going to have a place. And any wine region that has a place in the US Market does carve out a really nice
size market because it is. So this is such a big industry here. You know, you talk about regions like Georgia, which no one really thinks of as a. As a presence here. It's. It does 1012 million in sales annually. In the US and it's not, you know, of all the years that we tasted wines here, there's only one Georgian specific importer. Brilliant guy, Stetson. Greece is like that too. There's one dominant order and Greece is embraced by dynamic and organic wines. And they're
very good. That's a whole. It's very interesting the way you're positioning this because in the old days, you know, there were two wines, Butari, Namiya and a couple other Greek wines. That was it. They all broad market stuff, all brought in by this big. By the big houses. And now there's some boutique things. And I'm wondering. That's because consumerism's changing. Because fighting that same consumerism that is trying to find interesting things like from Storica is the
supermarket shelf. Yeah. With Josh and Apothec Red. And all those things taste the same that are on that shelf. Even like the big brands now from Napa have that same sort of character. And so you're trying to find a very nuanced thing. And I think, I think it's getting that way. Yeah. Here's why I say that the consumer, the drinking public is barraged now with everything. Right. Internet emails, you know, Google Ads, Facebook ads, they're all getting hammered by wine information flow. Right.
And, and I Think what's going on is, and you're talking about tourism, experiential side of wine is going to come back. And the picture behind you, my father was a president of his local or chapter of what they called Les Amie Devin and these people would come together, taste wines, do the tastings. And that is the slow part of this. Yeah, it is. And that's the exciting part for
what we're doing. And, and that's where we've gotten a lot of interest from development organizations like US ID who have a very large presence in Armenia. The go, the Ministry of Tourism and Economy of the government of Armenia. They want to use wine as a
conduit to stimulate tourism. And they, they see what you're saying, which is that if we can get people to come to Armenia, not only are they going to have a beautiful experience with our culture, but they're going to part of that's going to be them embracing and understanding our wines and then they're going to go home
and they're going to talk about it and they're going to consume our wines. And obviously for Storica, that's, that's our selfish business intent is to get more people to go and experience the wine regions in Armenia and then come home and drink the wine and tell their friends. So we're actually working on some really fun and exciting programs with the support of USAID and the government of Armenia to bring more people specifically to do wine tourism in Armenia. Define
usaid. Man, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually don't have the acronym in my head. They are an economic development organization. So it's US taxpayer dollars that are being spent to develop economies and industry in, in various countries around the world. Very specific to what you're doing. Right. Their mandate in Armenia is to stimulate the, the growth sectors of Armenia's economy. Wine being one of those. So they've approached us. We've actually been working with them informally
and formally for the last couple years. They've helped support some of our wine influencer trips to Armenia. So we've been sending groups of, of us based wine critics, writers, bloggers, sommeliers, some of the, some of the large distributors who we work with. We've sent some of their salespeople over to visit the region to meet with our winemakers, to meet with potential new wineries that we may work with. And so we've
split some of the costs of that with usaid. And then now we're working on a larger, a larger set of, of marketing and sales efforts to mimic what a lot of other regions do. Country of Georgia spends over $1 million a year on just marketing their wines. In the US so that's a very important part. That was the next question was, does the Armenian government care? And we, and that's a whole different political discussion which we won't have here.
But have they helped? And then I'll tell you a story about some of these local organizations. They definitely care. They, you know, the government of Armenia has a lot of other things that they have to prioritize spending their time and money and resources on. Unfortunately, hopefully one day they won't have as many existential things they have to worry about and they can spend more time and energy on wine. But right now, you know, this is really not their
priority. So while they care, there's not a whole lot they can do, both monetarily and otherwise, to support what we're doing here. And the burden has fell on Storica to do a of the things that have otherwise been done by governmental agencies in other niche regions like Georgia, like Austria, like Greece. You know, it's something that, you know, we'd like, we'd of course like to see
change. We'd like to see more of an investment made from the Armenian government and from other organizations in promoting Armenian wine in the US but for now we've got to do it because we're, we're the ones who are leading the charge of bringing these wines to the United States. It's kind of interesting. I had a Washington state winemaker in here who's also part of the commission of the Columbia Valley, I think it was, and this might be a radical
idea. Well, it's going to be for the Armenian winemakers. But what, what they do and many other groups, regional groups, because I've been to many regional tastings, Paso Robles, you know, Santa Ynez, whatever, they get together as a co op, so to speak, put together these events and that's how you get the word out what you're talking about. But what these guys do, they tax each other. Yeah, that's what they do in Austria. They pay a tax based on sales. Okay. So these guys pay it on tonnage
and then. But they all get together as the winemakers and proprietors and decide how to promote. Yeah. The region. That's great. But what would happen in Armenia if you try to tax somebody? Oh man. Putting a lot of people at one decision making table doesn't typically go well with Armenians. So that may be tough. So Miriam put it the best way. We're not team players, but I think this is important. This
is very important in our trade. So much of the industry is required to have that team mentality to share what you're going through, particularly when there's a. To say a disaster like Phylloxer or something comes through that, you know, if you're not cohesive and making decisions together, it's going to be rather fragmented and difficult to do. Yeah. And we've actually, I mean, we've seen our winemakers who we work with be a lot more cooperative and collaborative than
maybe we had expected, which is nice. We'd like to see more of that. But, but, but they all do care. And a lot of these, A lot of the winemakers of Armenia come from professional backgrounds where this is not their livelihood. This is something that they had a passion to do. And there's a lot of really amazing stories that we're hoping to tell, both through some of the marketing work we do, but also through the. The trips
that we send people on. And Paul, you went and you met with some of our winemaker, heard some of their stories, but they're all really beautiful stories. The. The walks of life they've come from, where they've always had this affinity for their culture of Armenia and the wine, and, and now they're. They're leading this sort of renaissance. And we're hoping to be able to. To tell more of those as we get more people to rally around these wines. But we're seeing that. We're seeing. We're seeing
more cooperation, more our efforts. I mean, I've always, because I'm passionate about this as an Armenian, this is not about, you know, let me find the one brand that's going to be a money maker and then let me just sell that brand. I wish we could import every single brand that exists now. There's a limit to how much we can do, but we've always tried to find ways to bring more wines here, to
give more wines a chance. We actually just added three brands to our portfolio that we brought over a couple pallets of each one basically, like, look, we're going to test these out, we're going to funnel these through our distribution infrastructure, and we'll see what really takes hold. Not a great business decision, but I've always had part of our mission be, it doesn't
matter if this is good business. We need to get as many wines from Armenia to the US as we can, as quickly as we can, because we don't know which ones are going to match certain taste profiles of the US consumer. And it's just good. It's good for Armenia to have multiple brands and multiple winemakers represented in this market. You know, it's. People have sat in that same chair and variety of outlooks on this industry, and it's obvious
what side of the fence you're on. You're on the passionate side of this and in for the long haul. There are people have sat there that have come up with some novel idea like a can or something or a 375 bottle of wine like that. So revolutionary, but clearly hoping to gain some kind of market share and sell it off and make their billion dollars move on and that. And I guess that's fine because that's capitalism. But wine, it's
pretty hard to play that game. And I think you've noticed already in the short time you've done this and the headwinds you've had, that it takes only passion to see through all this passion. And you gotta be willing to admit when you've made a mistake and pivot quickly. So we. About a year and a half ago, we were 18 people. We were burning, I won't say the dollar amount because it's pretty embarrassing. We were burning a lot of
money on a monthly basis. And while I, of course, wanted to continue to try to do everything we could to stimulate interest in the wines, I had to make a tough decision to let go of some people and to really trim down our expenses because it was a question of whether we would be able to still exist as a company.
And so while that was painful for, you know, our stateside effort and also painful for some of our winemakers who are expecting us to buy a lot higher volume of wine than we wound up buying over the last 12, 18 months, in the long term, it's going to wind up benefiting the region and our effort because, you know, we need to stay alive. We're. There have been a couple other importers of Armenian wine
that have tried, and it's not worked out for them. We wish it had, because we think this is a situation where, you know, with a rising tide, all boats rise, or there's only. There's only benefit from having more exposure of Armenian wine in the US and we're hoping that more importers will. Will step up and find a way to resource what is a very difficult business, particularly in the first five or ten years. We've been at this for almost five years now. It's. We're entering our fifth
year. And yeah, I can say that it's, it's tough, but we see things starting to trend in the right direction. You said to me at Guinea Fest the first time we met, I don't, you said something like, sorry, man, or something. We didn't know what we were doing. And I'm wondering if that's, you know, coming out of the gates, 18 people pumping it up, you know, this is a product, we can make it work. Everybody, all you have to do is dot our I's and cross our T's and this
is a product that we could make. And then you realize, I think this is what you're trying to tell me at the point. You realize, yeah, this is a different road than marketing a widget that everybody can use. Yeah, well, we certainly, I certainly still don't know what I'm doing in this world. And my co founders, it's a tough world. It's a tough market. And the industry has been pretty, has performed pretty poorly in the U.S. like, wine consumption is down all over. All over. Yeah. So we're
in a tough environment. But I took a very first principles approach of just find people who are capable and who care about the mission that we're on, which is to bring a brand new category to the most competitive wine market in the world. We knew it was going to be difficult. And as long as we see signs that, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, let's keep finding ways to,
to try and fail. And we certainly, we certainly tried a lot and failed a lot in the beginning, but it didn't, it didn't kill our business, which I think is ultimately a good sign. And now we're, we're in a place where if we see the, the industry start to turn back around and we see that there is a growing desire for the large sort of middle of the value chain players, the sort of legalized bootleggers from Prohibition come back around to wanting new regions and new
brands. I think that'll wind up really helping the Armenian wine industry. There's an argument going on. Well, it's been going on for a long time, but one of the first things that came out of the, when the Armenian wines were being made properly, that was the first thing that had to happen, is the technology had to go there and they had to sort of understand the western style winemaking. And like I said, it's cyclical, depending on style, but at least they're doing it the right way.
But then it was, well, you know, we got to have you know, the world is ready for Adani. I heard that how many times? And Adam is a wonderful grape. And I have my personal opinions about, you know, whether it should be oaked or not, etc. But do we pursue. And when I had the conversation with David that Voskovas and I just reading his. I have to read the captions because I don't speak the language.
He's saying, you know, the world is ready for Voska hat and Kangun and Otany and all these grapes, when that probably adds to the headwinds of getting the marketplace to understand. And let me switch a little bit. There was a Moldavian wine that came in here years ago. It was called Hickory Ridge, clearly a Moldovan name.
And finally you had to drill down the back label that the wines, the grapes were made and grown in Moldavia, but, you know, there was marketed through and they did everything they could to make it look like it was an American wine, except for, you know, vintage and bottled. And, and so I thought, okay, does
Armenian have the same headwinds? Are they, are they not only struggling with trying to get a region recognized, but now we're also talking about varietals that we have to figure out how to get understood, or do we just put white wine? That's a good question. Jack's blend. We, we've debated do we change or do we seek to use different names for certain grapes? I mean, the country of Ar Actually decided
to refer to the Khandoni grape as the Sidani grape. They thought Sidani was an easier word to say, which it is still not the easiest. So there has been some of that already from the, the Armenia side infrastructure from my perspective. And you know, philosophically, we want Armenian culture to be, to be very much part of the Storica story. You know, we want to, we don't want to import brands that are producing non Armenian
grapes in Armenian. Armenia, because even though it's a product of Armenia, it's not an Armenian varietal. So that's, you know, that's a philosophical thing. That's not right, wrong or indifferent. So in the, in the topic of, you know, you can't, it's hard to pronounce Voskahad or it's hard to pronounce. Okay, you know, use some phonetic cards, which is what we've done. We've, we've, we've brought like the phonetic way to pronounce these to our sales trainings, and we've used it in some of
our shelf talkers. So there are ways to to make it fun and make it less of a challenge. But it certainly is. Is causing some headwind. To your question about, do you bucket these into categories that avoid having to call it a new category? Like, we've had some shops say to us, well, I love this wine, but I don't have an Armenia section, so I don't know where to put it.
Right. In the case of Adeni, let's say. But when we bring them our Kush sparkling wine, since it's champagne method, they say, I love this wine, and I'll just put it in the champagne cooler. So, you know. Okay, we want to win from a business perspective. So in that respect, we want our wines to fit into wine categories that have literal shelf space or menu space. And so in the case of. Let's. Like in the. In the case of Vonardi, which is a red blend, it's a blend about any. And. And we
call that a red blend. We lead with, hey, this is a red blend. Yeah. It's coming from Armenia, and it's these two grapes, which you really can't pronounce but will help. That's how we're trying to get adoption going, is to say, yeah, you may not have an Armenia category, or you may not have an Eastern Europe category, but this is champagne. This is a red blend, and where we have opportunity, we'll keep doing that. I guess it's like my dad's shop. In that picture, it was Cabernet Nap and other
reds. For now, we're in other reds for the wine list. For now, we're in other reds, But. I think, you know, and we call that a hand sell. Right. And if you're. If you're on a restaurant list. Yeah. Not too many people are walking and saying, can I get an odd knee or a volcano? I heard that term so much in the beginning. Hand sell. And. And I. I mean, I understand the literal meaning of you need someone to physically hand this to a customer for them to ever know it even
exists. But. But the. The. The. The. Like, what that really means has really, I've learned over the years that's really like. Like, this is hard. It's a manual exposure. Yeah. No one's walking into a shop and saying, hey, where? Show me your best identity. Yeah, right. Exactly. And that's been like that for a little while. But when I do pour, for instance, the Karasi Voska, which I think is one of the stupendous
wines. Beautiful. I mean, I just. Yeah. When it comes to expression, complexity, showing a place a Time of place. Yeah, I haven't had anything that I think is as good as that. And even though I tasted every single wine at Guinea Fest last time there was 75 wines, it still stood out to me. But you have to just put it in the glass. You have to and just say, taste this. So Vosqueja or Vosque Vaz is an example of a beautiful set of wines. I mean, these wines
would compete with 3, 4, 500 French wines. But they're not French. That's the problem. And so what do you do with them? And we've tried many different approaches. What we've tried, which we thought was creative enough to work and it's worked a little bit, is go to five star Michelin star restaurants, all of which have tasting menus where they're looking for wines that are interesting, that have a story that show and taste like very expensive wines.
And maybe instead of them pouring a $200 French wine, which they buy for 60 bucks, let them pour Voskat or Voskavas rather, which, which shows like a $200 French wine and has a really interesting story that a custom tasting menu may like and they get to charge whatever they want and make more margin by buying it for a quarter of the price. Right. That's been our approach. It's worked in some markets, but you know, that's one where it seems like it makes perfect
sense in theory. But you know, going and getting in front of these directors of these restaurants and getting them to be willing to switch out a tried and true, you know, French or Italian or Californian wine is just tough. It's just, it's just really difficult hand to hand combat. It's not any easier today because everybody's trying to cut back on their list. They're trying to reduce the number of vendors they're doing business with. That's right. And you know, post Covid World
has created a different restauranteur and it's still us doing it. You know, we, we have some really great distributors around the country and they have their teams of sales reps, many of whom have embraced the wines. But there's still a lot of need for Storica to be proactively involved in the selling process. And, and what we now aspire to become is, is, is part of a larger sort of distribution infrastructure that has just armies and armies of people
who can get behind the story. And then now you're dealing with markets where Instead of having four or five sales reps, you've got 40 or 50. It becomes a lot easier to do that hand to hand combat for, for. Voskvaz and you know, the headwinds to that already. But. Right, yeah, I mean that's the southern. Or young, highly competitive set of portfolio slots. Lots. The problem in the
industries already know. But the books are getting thicker, which means your, your, the vision, your vision is getting smaller. And then that requires you to go into that sales mode and get into those conferences and have those conversations. You know, there's an interesting group I don't know if you ever heard of, it's called Odiny Global. Have you heard of this? I
have heard that name. So there, it's a, it's, it's a female run French group out of the Rhone and its purpose is to organize wineries that have headwinds and to help them understand the marketplace and. But why they call it oddity is the most interesting, fascinating thing. It's a very. The woman who ran it was here and she said because it's unknown and we want people to learn, people understand. And so we call it. But they're not Armenian. No, completely French. Okay.
Like the tough French. I mean they're really talented women to do this. This is a, this is sort of a tough question. It's more of a philosophical question because we've always had in this industry entry level things to do in the 70s, 1974, when Sutterholm came out with white Zinfandel that brought people to the table. Lee from, you know, Blue Nun back in the day brought people to the table. Matus, Pet Matus and the other Portuguese wine would bring
lancers, would bring people to the table that otherwise would. So you. So when you walk into the shelf, you walk into the market. Today when you're going home, you can stop at Ralph's. Every single wine has a shelf talker. It's got a tag. Yeah. It's either got a score or it's got a price reduction or something. And you're looking at the sea of yellow or red or green or whatever color that the market uses.
How do you get any traction doing that? And what if it's really not the question, what if, what if profitability was not part of this equation? What if wine was a product where we didn't need to worry about making a profit? Would we have a different set of. Would things be different on the shelf? That's a good question. I mean there's probably no answer to this, but. Well, I think the first thing people are going to look at a label and they're going to look at
a Price. And so people who are wine enthusiasts, right, not like the super duper experts, but people who know enough about wine to know that a champagne method sparkling white priced anything below 30 bucks is probably pretty good value. Right? Like there are enough people in this country that, that, that have enough knowledge of wine or a red blend from Italy, if it's good quality and it's priced, you know, in the 19 to 23 range like that. Okay, that's probably a pretty
good value. Let me look at, let me go look at this wine. I think things like that are probably the first things that draw people. What would be in the bottle be different? Like if, if you were, if I was making wine. Yeah, then he. And the budget wasn't a problem because it didn't matter that he would be more expressive of what he's doing or he, or that philos the philosophy of
making wine the way he makes it. Regardless of the budget and the cost, I'm still going to put in the bottle the most expressive thing I can do. Well, guys like Vaje, because he said this to me and others and it's a beautiful thing is he cares to, to produce a volume that's going to support the villages that he has relationships with. So he said he tells the people in the villages that he buys his grapes from, don't sell your grapes to anyone else.
I'm always going to give you 5 or 10% above market and I'm going to buy all your grapes no matter what. And that's supporting these communities. Right. So there's obviously an altruistic and philanthropic almost component to how he thinks about what he should be doing regardless of the money he's, he's spending. And that's a beautiful story. And that's part of what we saw in the Psalm movie that, that you know, we really hoped people would latch onto and, and rally around Kush as his
sparkling wine product. So I think there are some that think that way of just, you know, part of why I did this and why I, I labor through it even though I'm not making much money is because I know that what I'm doing is benefiting these, these people in these communities that otherwise would not have much of a, a means of economic sustenance. That is actually the best
answer. It's actually you're the only person that's come in here that could say that answer because you have a relationship with Vahe and he's truly irregardless of what needs, what the needs are. Profitability wise. He is making A commitment to this community and these farmers that he's going to buy. And it's not just Vi. I mean, Vi is great, and he's a. He's a forebearer of this movement. But all of our wineries, even those that have their own vineyards, like Von Rd, they will still
go buy a certain portion of their. Of their grapes every year from local farmers. And part of it is because they. They have these relationships with these growers who have been growing on those vines for. For generations. And they want to support them, provided that it's good quality, which, you know, that's part of the requirement. There is this. There is this sort of desire among all the wine, the leading wineries of Armenia, to support the small.
The small growers. And that I think leads to a better product in the bottle. Beyond. Beyond just the story. You just define passion. You know, that's. Profitability is not the primary goal. The community is the primary goal. And the passion to make the right thing is the primary goal. That's right. You know, we're almost out of time here, oddly. Wow. But felt like we just started. Yeah. You just said something I want we should touch on,
which is the movie the cup of Salvation. And I made sure that that Armenian vintners in Napa went and visited and saw the movie when they were in Napa. And she wanted to. She wanted me to come up and bring a bottle of the wine and taste other things with her and her fellow winemakers at the same time. We haven't done it yet, but I do have the bottle here. But let's just talk about the marketing for a second. You know, I sent.
I was averaging when I was marketing my club, when there was a mail, a million pieces of mail a year. I'm not here to brag about metrics. Then when that stopped being effective the last year business, I did 33 million emails. Okay, that's. I sent out in one 12 months. Okay. It's a lot. Right. But I thought when the movie came out, and it's not the purpose of the movie, but from
a marketing tool had not been done. You know, there are. There have been a handful of successful media shows on wine, you know, drops of God being one of them, some other things, but they're not about wine. And here's a cool story about Vahe and what he does with the Iranian grapes. Is that what it set out to be? Like this. We're going to try to use this movie to be a marketing tool.
And if that's the case, how Brilliant. Just so I put it up front. But if it's not so, doesn't mean they're not brilliant. But was that what it was for or was it Tell the story. No, we. I cannot take credit for that movie. That was total luck and serendipity. We. We didn't, we didn't commission it. We had nothing to do with it. They actually started making the film. The Psalm production team, some TV team, Jason White, started making the film before we even
started Storica. So we just. Yeah, they started in 2018 and only about an a year and a half ago when the movie was in post production did I realize that it was the same company that made the original Saw movie, which was a pretty well regarded movie on Netflix. So then I said, oh, wow, this is actually a real
movie. We're going to. We should benefit from this. So we then got involved and we did a marketing campaign with SOM TV where they featured Storica and our wines report at some of the showings around the country. And they had our logo up with a QR code to our shop online at the end of some of the screenings. So we wound up benefiting from it quite a bit. Last year and into the early part of this year, we've seen the. We've seen the sort of boom
from sales growth dissipate a little bit. But, you know, we think overall the movie will continue to pay dividends just for awareness of our. It'll be a. It'll be an artifact that everyone will always be able to go to and say, oh, wow, this is a really cool story about one of the forebears of the Armenian wine movement. And it should get on one of the streaming platforms for free this year. And then that hopefully will drive some viewership. But no, that was total. That was total luck.
Well, you're brilliant. Anyway, Zach, we all know this. Thank you. Well, I, I do believe that we'll end on this thought. I do believe. And I, I did this in the voiceover that would you. Of the movie you. The show we were talking about earlier, which is Wine is about the story. It can't be that we're sitting at dinner together and the story is, I got this for five
bucks on the Internet. That's not a story. No, the story is, hey, there's this young man who started this company and this is one of the wines he brings in this Armenia. That whole story evolves at the dinner table because one thing about wine that's like no other beverage, nobody sits around with a shot of Jack Daniels and tries to figure out, you know, what the sour mash
blend was. They don't have that conversation. But. But wine, even though it's an intimidating subject for many, many people to discuss, it's an unintimidating conversation piece at the end of the evening. It's always, it's always interesting. Yeah. It's always cool. And they all ask the questions. As long as you're not being arrogant about the answer, they want to know more. Yeah. And so the story is, how did what's in the bottle become what's in the bottle?
Yeah. And that's what tells the story. Absolutely. And we've got. Armenia has the benefit of having a really rich set of story pieces, you know, content pieces that we get to work with, both from the ancient history of it and how the geopolitical evolution of Armenia as an independent
republic has now led to this renaissance of winemaking. And that is now being brought forward by mainly Diasporan Armenians, which are, you know, Armenians coming from other parts of the world, but committing their time and energy and moving their families to Armenia to be a part of this movement. Those are beautiful stories, and those are actually representative of the way Armenians
operate broadly. We all feel, all of us in the diaspora feel a connection to Armenia, our homeland, and we find ways to stay connected, whether it be just by visiting every year or by participating in charitable organizations or other efforts of, like, emblematic, if you will, the way the Armenian wine industry has now evolved. It's emblematic of the Armenian
culture broadly. So that's just a cool story, right? Whether, whether someone who's drinking the wine in a, at a wine bar in Omaha or, you know, someone who is tasting it in a, by the glass placement in New York City, like, if they get to have that, like, glimmer of curiosity, where did this come from? And they do a little digging. They'll. They'll come across the story and then they'll hopefully go visit Armenia and they'll go tell their friends. And that's really how our
business is going to win. It's not going to be from, like, you know, doing influencer campaigns on Instagram and, and doing a whole bunch of email blasts. And I mean, those things will help, but those things will help. Once we've got that initial, like, light bulb turning on from enough people in this country who actually care to consume a really cool story. We're going to leave it at that. It was well put. Thanks for joining us today.
Travels the rest of the trip. Thank you. And I'm sure We're going to do this again. Let's do it. We'll bring Vaje with us next. Yeah. Cheers.