TBT-Market Visit (Chicago)

Gina and I were going through some old pictures and decided we should share some of our past market visit trips to explain what life on the road selling wine is like.  Here is a rundown of our post pandemic travel hiatus, visit to Chicago to work with our distributor Lagniappe Beverage for the first time.

We flew into O’hare and took an entry approach out over the Lake.

A relatively short car ride into the West Loop got us to our hotel, and a much needed bite to eat and cocktail.

We met old friends Chris and Kate out for drinks at the rooftop of the Ace Hotel and happened onto a pretty bitchin’ LGBTQ event.

Post drinks the restaurant industry veterans (Chris is Chef/Owner at Lardon)  had dinner reservations for us at the up-coming Moody Tongue gastropub and brewery. We shared a few flights of interesting ales to pair with dinner.

The next morning we arrived at Lagniappe’s downtown offices to meet the sales team, taste through our wines, and give our spiel.

Gina and I typically enjoy traveling together. 1. because the work trips are like mini vacations, and 2. because we get to split up work with different sales reps and hit double the number of accounts as we can solo.  We split up and went to a number of pre-arranged accounts to pour our wines and talk all things Sans Wine Co. with buyers at retail and restaurant locations around Chicago.

We met the sales staff for a late lunch at the amazing Pizza Lobo. If you haven’t been, we highly recommend it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next we hit a couple more accounts, and poured our wines for the public for a couple hours at Bitter Pops (down the street from Wrigley) to finish off the day:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That evening we went to Aba a Mediterranean restaurant just down the street from our hotel and met up with Sam and Leah (the brains behind Lagniappe) to “talk shop” over a great meal, Negronis and a crazy bottle the sommelier “blinded” us on.

 

The next morning we were picked up separately by sales reps and hit a number of accounts.

Our second to last tasting of the day was with Derrick Westbrook, owner of Juice @1340 Wine Bar.  Derrick is doing amazing things and it was fun to meet him and share our wines.

 

 

 

 

The day kind of got backed up as is prone to happen on these market trips, we finished our last tasting at Warehouse Liquors downtown and Gina and I scrambled to catch a train to the airport with our luggage.  Aside from losing some water weight given the Summer humidity, we made it just on time to catch our plane to D.C. where we landed around 11pm found a rental car and proceeded to work the DC and Virginia markets for the next 3 days.

Wine market trips can be a lot of running around, a fair amount of entertaining and imbibing, but mainly a great opportunity to meet new folks and share the Sans Wine Co. wines and message!!

Here’s a bunch of the other accounts we went to.  If you are in Chicago, look for our wines here and request them if they are out of stock 🙂

Bottles & Cans

Binny’s Beverage Depot (in a bunch of stores)

Plein Air Café

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jake Stover.