Going to Market with Claire Smith

When you buy a bottle of wine in a tasting room, the wine industry calls that “direct to consumer” or DTC, for short. Claire Smith likes to call them “hand sales.” There’s a direct connection between the winery staff and you—they hand you a bottle of wine, you hand them some cash, and off you happily go.

But what about bottles that are not going directly into the hands of an eager consumer, but rather to a restaurant, wine shop, or grocery store? For this, you need a distributor. As the founder of Cellar Door Solutions, LLC, a sales consulting firm, Claire helps new and smaller wineries in the Pacific Northwest to find the best solutions to get their wine to market.

Before we go further, a quick primer on the three-tier alcohol distribution system in the United States:

The three-tier system was devised post-Prohibition. The basic idea is producers/importers sell their wine/spirits/beer to wholesale distributors. The distributors then sell the products to retailers. Consumers purchase their alcohol from retailers. This system was to prevent back-handed dealings, price fixing, and other potential bad behaviors.

In 2011 in Washington state, voters did away with this system, allowing retailers to buy directly from producers. However, the majority of producers still use distributors because of their expertise and access. Read more on Wikipedia.

Iowa, home of the Capital Call Middlebrook Mercantile, is a control state. This means the state regulates the distribution of alcohol. To learn more, read this one-pager from the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association.

So, back to Claire.

Born and raised in Washington, Claire comes from a family of vineyard managers, winery owners, and regional sales managers. She began her career at Nestlé as a vendor representative for retail accounts. Concurrently, she attended night school at Pierce College in Tacoma (where she currently lives) and earned an Associate Degree in Business Management.

Heeding the call of the beverage industry, Claire became a sales representative at Southern Glazier & Spirits as a full book rep, soon moving to the Ste. Michelle Wine Estates dedicated team. Taking on an account manager position with the Estates Group at Republic National Distribution Company, she moved quickly to manager for both off- and on-premise sales. Claire spent a year at Aquilini Beverage Group as their Northwest Regional Sales Manager, and then, when the company decided to go a different way, she took time to re-evaluate what matters to her most in the wine industry—it was helping family businesses share their legacy.

Cellar Door Solutions came about by an encounter with Capital Call Vintners winemaker Josh Maloney, with whom she had worked a few times.

Now that she was available, Josh asked Claire to represent his new projects. She was touched by his willingness to invest in her knowledge. “We clicked so well,” said Claire. “He said to me, ‘Wine people know wine people.’”

Claire’s goal as founder of Cellar Door Solutions, LLC is to work with small PNW-based wineries to help create market strategies, find the right distribution company, and build brand education for sales teams so they have everything they need to successfully sell in the marketplace.

“I want to continue to grow the Washington wine culture and be an advocate for the people wanting to grow their business,” she said. “CDS is that middleman for wineries who need that extra person to relay their message. I just love sharing the wineries’ stories.”

For Capital Call, Claire has two areas of focus. The first is to establish relationships with restaurants and retailers to introduce them to the Capital Call portfolio and to encourage them to carry the brand. The second is to plan the distribution debut of our new Cashflow label. This affordable line of easy-drinking red wines was specifically made to introduce the Red Mountain AVA and Capital Call to a wider audience.

“Red Mountain is very sellable,” she said. “It’s regionally famous and it could be even more so.”

Cashflow will be bottled in late July and to market soon after. It will also be available in the Walla Walla tasting room.

“I’m excited to work with Steve [Bruere, CCV co-owner] and visit his home state of Iowa to further spread the CCV brand,” said Claire, “And to do more AVA education for folks west of the Rockies.”

We are thrilled to have a sales and distribution professional of Claire’s caliber working with us on this new project.