In 1984, Jim Bundschu sent me to Los Angeles to see if I could jump start some wine sales. I worked with Jim McCullough who represented our wines through Seagram’s Chateau & Estate Wines Company. This was to be the last year we worked with Chateau and Estate, so we were also looking for someone to head up our sales program. We interviewed a few candidates, but no one really impressed us. After spending five days with Jim McCullough, I was sure he was the right fit for sales manager. He had experience, knowledge and passion for wine and he was a terrific salesman who knew how to work with distributors, set up programs, and locate key accounts.
The last event of the week was a wine tasting in Orange County where the two of us manned a table pouring Gundlach Bundschu wine. We were one of 20 wineries at the tasting. Just before the tasting, McCullough introduced me to Doug and Annie Diefenthaler. Jim knew the Diefenthalers from his days selling wine in Colorado. In fact, Doug took over Jim’s mountain territory when Jim moved on to become sales manager for Familia Torres Winery in the United States.
After the tasting, Jim, Doug, and Annie headed to Palm Springs to spend the weekend together. I returned to Sonoma and spent time in discussions with Jim Bundschu about how we’d move forward once we left Chateau & Estate. Eventually, based on my recommendation, Bundschu interviewed McCullough and offered him the position as Sales Manager for Gundlach Bundschu. After the interview, McCullough came over to my house for dinner. All he could talk about was this “Wine Patrol” concept he, Doug and Annie had come up with that weekend in Palm Springs.
They had spent that entire Palm Springs weekend drinking wine and tequila and talking about the state of the wine industry. Their inebriated discussions focused on the good guys: the dozens of small wineries run by dedicated people who were passionate about wine. Then there were the bad guys: large distribution companies and corporate wineries who controlled how wine was sold and focused on profits. The good guys, were like the peasants in the Magnificent Seven being held down and at the mercy of the big interests. They needed some tough High Plains Drifter types (Wine Rangers) to teach them how to stand up against the big interests who kept them stuck at the bottom of the totem pole. If those Wine Rangers could educate and train the dedicated but clueless winemakers in the ways of sales, they might have a fighting chance against the bad guys.
Those Wine Rangers would be called the Wine Patrol. The premise was that we could establish small outposts of trained patrollers who would go to war with the big distributors. They would serve as examples to others. This was the intellectual birth of the Wine Patrol. The concept of a Wine Patrol remained simple musings of friends sitting around drinking wine and talking about the industry until a series of disconnected events brought the concept into full bloom.
By 1996, Gundlach Bundschu had seen substantial increases in wine sales, and we were convinced that humor in our marketing would be successful and make us stand out. Jim McCullough and I decided to put together a seminar to teach small wineries how to deal with distributors, make calls on customers, and successfully sell their wines in various markets. We created a business entity to set up this training program. We registered our company as the Sonoma Valley Wine Patrol. I hired Chuck House to design a logo.
We put out notices and two dozen winemakers and winery owners signed up for that first seminar. Doug Diefentaler attended as a lecturer. McCullough explained how to set up programs with distributors. I focused on how winemakers could effectively use their time when working markets. We had them participate in role plays, changing buyer and seller roles. Unanimously, the participants loved the seminar saying it gave them ammunition to fight the good fight and sell their wares.
We told them they were the first rangers of the Wine Patrol. They needed to take what they had learned and successfully penetrate markets across the country. They needed to enlist like-minded people into the Wine Patrol. There was no set criteria for who these Wine Patrollers would be, but we assured them that they’d know one when they saw one.
