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Vintrust expands into Sonoma County

HIGH-END WINE HANDLER LEASES SANTA ROSA SPACE TO SERVE MORE CUSTOMERS

SANTA ROSA – A San Francisco-based company that helps collectors, restaurateurs and vintners store, manage or ship their high-value wines is expanding to serve wineries in the rest of the North Coast from a new location set to open this summer in Santa Rosa.

Vintrust has leased a 28,000-square-foot warehouse on Circadian Way in southwest Santa Rosa and is equipping it with climate controls and high-technology monitoring and security systems to mirror a facility opened in American Canyon in 2005, according to Steve Gant, vice president of Vintrust Winery Services.

When the Santa Rosa warehouse opens in July, it will allow Vintrust to cater to wineries in northern Napa Valley as well as Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties.

“Our Napa Valley warehouse has been at capacity for 18 months,” Mr. Gant said.

The American Canyon warehouse holds about 40,000 cases of wine for around 60 producers, which make anywhere from a few hundred cases a year to 8,000. A number of the current winery clients will be transferring their wine libraries and current releases to the new facility, according to Mr. Gant.

Vintrust has a truck used for some limited transportation of client wines, but most wines arrive from the custom processor or the winery via contract trucking companies at indoor loading docks to protect the bottles from extremes in temperature. Shipments go out to consumers by carriers UPS and FedEx.

Though the carriers have been charging more because of soaring fuel costs, such as a 25 percent surcharge from FedEx, Vintrust hasn’t seen a drop in orders processed, according to Mr. Gant.

“The clientele we serve has consumers paying $100 a bottle or more, so to a certain degree they are a little less price-sensitive on shipping,” he said.

Many of Vintrust’s winery clients have more potential buyers of new releases than bottles, so they allocate sales via exclusive mailing lists.

The winery services side of Vintrust for collectable and prized wines was a logical progression for a company that started out catering to collectors.

Vintrust co-founder and Chairman Andre de Baubigny was a collector who said he couldn’t find a properly configured, easily accessible venue for his wines.

In 2003, Mr. de Baubigny, an investment banker, and his friend Timothy Komada, a tech management consultant, set out to create “an investment bank for wine,” or a safe, accessible place for high-net-worth collectors to house and inventory their wines. That October, they opened a collector-oriented warehouse in American Canyon, complete with Web-enabled cameras for collectors to view their wines remotely.

Interestingly, their first client was early cult cabernet sauvignon producer Grace Family Vineyards of St. Helena, so Vintrust developed storage and fulfillment services for such boutique vintners and restaurants that followed.

Vintrust is looking into offering reporting, permitting and licensing compliance assistance to small producers overwhelmed by the complex web of state laws on direct-to-consumer shipments that has arisen in the three years since the U.S. Supreme Court decision.

A number of direct-shipment companies have launched in that time to help wineries fulfill Internet and club orders, and a number of those either handle compliance themselves or outsource it.

Vintrust now has two warehouses in American Canyon, one in New Jersey for the East Coast and more than 2,000 clients – the value of whose collections can run into the millions of dollars.

The Santa Rosa facility will employ five to start and likely will have 11 workers when it is at capacity, as is the case at the American Canyon warehouse.

For more information, call 877-846-8787 or visit www.vintrust.com.

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