Lieb Behind the Scenes – December 2015

With 50 degree temps outside, it’s hard to believe that the year is coming to a close. Then again, the telltale signs are all around.  Foliage has fallen from the vines as they begin to go dormant.  Our tasting room elves have decorated with lights, trees and stockings. The sweet, spicy aromas of mulled wine permeate from our Bridge Lane tasting room – a new winter menu addition made from our Red Blend box wine!  2015 has been a pretty incredible year for us.  As a company, we’re on track to exceed our 20% sales growth goal vs. 2014.  But it wasn’t an easy road.  We worked our butts off to earn every one of those dollars.  There were many successes.  Like the expansion of our box and keg lines earlier this year and renovating our Bridge Lane tasting room.  Two awesome, sold-out wine club events, and some super cool, high-profile NYC event sponsorships.  Our Pinot Blanc being named a top 12 wine in America by Wall Street Journal, and a Q4 wholesale support effort that involved almost every member of #TeamLieb (even our accountant!) hitting the streets of NYC and spreading the gospel of Lieb and Bridge Lane.  But, there were an equal number of shortfalls.  With the amount of effort needed in our current states, we weren’t able to expand distribution into the mid-Atlantic this year.  Our wine club membership grew, but not as much as we were hoping.  Our tasting rooms faced some crowd-control problems, and we ran out of White Merlot boxes and kegs way too early in the season due to overly conservative production planning.  My favorite thing about the end of year, though – besides our holiday party (Brix & Rye, here we come!) and vacation schedule (Montauk, here I come!)  – is that we as a company get to start completely fresh next year.  We get to expand on our successes and learn from our missteps.  We’ll make new plans, new wines and new goals.  We’ll do things smarter and more efficiently.  I’m extremely proud of our team and excited that we reached our 20% goal this year but I’m more excited about that number resetting to 0% on Jan 1 and doing it all over again next year WAY better.

I was planning to examine the subject of sparkling wine with this blog post, but I think I’ll hold off and save that topic for next month.   Instead, I’m going to go grab a bottle of our Sparkling Rosé from the fridge, tell the team stop working, pop it open and pour them each a glass.  December is a time for reflection and celebration.  We’ll return to full throttle in January.

Cheers!  Happy holidays!

Ami Opisso

General Manager & Certified Sommelier, Lieb Cellars