Have you ever had an amazing bottle of wine on vacation and wished you could safely pack one – or six – in a suitcase to bring home? Enter FlyWithWine and VinGardeValise®. Instead of carefully wrapping a bottle in a checked bag (yes, we’ve tried it) or paying exorbitant amounts of money to ship wine home, we can highly recommend investing in a wine suitcase to make flying with wine easy-peasy.
VinGardeValise suitcases, distributed by our friends at FlyWithWine and sold on the Coravin marketplace, double as suitcases for your non-wine essentials. To learn more, Coravin’s own Lindsay Buck sat down with FlyWithWine CEO, Ron Scharman. The pair discuss how FlyWithWine became the official distributor of VinGardeValise, what the next year holds for wine tourism, and Scharman's favorite wine experience.
VinGardeValise Wine Suitcases Makes Flying with Wine Easy
Lindsay Buck, Coravin: Today I'm talking to Ron Scharman, CEO of FlyWithWine, who's VinGardeValise® products we carry on our marketplace at Coravin.com. Welcome, Ron, how are things in Napa?
Ron Scharman, FlyWithWine: Oh, just lovely. It's springtime.
LB: Excellent, nice time to be there. Congrats on being becoming the exclusive distributor of VinGardeValise®. That was an evolution of an existing partnership, correct?
RS: Yes, we've been doing business with VinGarde for six years, we started off as a reseller, and ultimately became their largest customer. We’re pretty much the lead marketing innovators for them. Eventually, they decided it made sense to give us the keys to the to the racing car, I guess.
LB: Awesome. I have to ask, how have things been in the past year? Have you had to adapt your business in any way with the lack of travel?
RS: Well, our number one customer audience is in tasting rooms. We’re in about 250 tasting rooms, so with all of the tasting rooms shut down, that became a problem for us. That said, we were able to work with third party marketplaces – some large retail accounts outside the wine industry. We suffered like other retailers have suffered