I don’t know much about wine except that I enjoy reds more than whites. I know that reds go with beef and the whites go with poultry and fish.
I know my limit is two glasses, a threshold which — regrettably — I have violated more than once.
That makes me a casual wine fan, and a potential customer of Destination Cellars, a Dulles-based business catering to the world’s growing fascination with wine.
“We create experiences,” said founder David Keuhner, 42, a self-described foodie with whom I share some Nationals baseball tickets.
Want to fly to Tuscany and travel from luxurious villa to villa, lunching, dining, touring and sipping from a $100 bottle of Brunello? Five days will cost you $10,000, which is what a top golfer recently paid.
How about some Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1982? Keuhner recently brokered the sale of two bottles to a Hong Kong client for $12,700, earning a $2,000 commission.
What’s also interesting is the dual career track that led to Keuhner’s wine company. His boots-on-the-ground apprenticeship started as a teenager, when his uncle, a sommelier at the historic 21 Club in New York, instilled in him a love of wine. He continued the learning experience, including the importance of customer service, running a couple of Ruth’s Chris Steak House restaurants in the Washington area.
But he also developed a knowledge of technology, jumping from startup to startup — think Open Table, the restaurant reservation Web site, or Fishbowl, a company that helps restaurants with marketing — where he developed sales skills, learned how to pitch venture capitalists and gained expertise in how to use the Internet to learn more about a restaurant’s clients.
The result is Destination Cellars, a seven-employee company that might gross $2 million this year, double its 2010 revenue and several times the $300,000 that Destination Cellars grossed in 2009. It has yet to turn a profit, and has no debt.
The company is getting noticed. Keuhner recently received a request for a meeting from Accel Partners, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for savvy investments in companies such as Facebook.
Keuhner’s clients include passionate wine collectors known as oenophiles (Look it up. I did), casual fans who want to know more and know-nothings who are intimidated at the pop of a cork.
More than 3,000 customers have used his services. Clients include Doug Donatelli of First Potomac Realty Trust, MasterCard, Bain Capital, Steve Case’s Exclusive Resorts, business groups such as the Young Presidents’ Organization, Merrill Lynch and Denver-based Inspirato, a hot new vacation club.
About half of Destination’s $2 million revenue comes from the travel tours, while 40 percent comes from wine sales and 10 percent from corporate wine events. The big profits and growth come from sales, where overhead is low and volume is virtually unlimited. Wholesalers and retailers don’t like Keuhner because he brokers sales directly between the winery and customer, circumventing traditional bricks-and-mortar stores.
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