Specialty Food Magazine

Spanish Wine Campaign Aligns With Specialty Retailers Small, specialty retailers are the backbone of a marketing campaign promoting wines from two regions in Spain. The Ribera y Rueda wine campaign, which is promoting wines from the Ribera del Duero and Rueda regions north of Madrid, is in the second year of a multi-year program that is leveraging the expertise of specialty retailers, says Greg O'Neill, who is leading the effort for Ribera y Rueda. O'Neill, a former specialty retailer himself, says small retailers provide an ideal venue for building awareness and cachet around the wines—Ribera del Duero's highly regarded Tempranillo wines and Rueda Verdejo, the top- selling white wine in Spain. The wines are highly regarded in Europe and elsewhere, he says, but are just gaining recognition in the U.S. "When you have special wines like that, you don't want them getting lost on a mass shelf, being shopped purely on price," he says. Specialty retailers such as Antonelli's Cheese Shop in Austin, Texas; Di Bruno Bros. in Philadelphia, and Greene Grape Wine & Spirits in Brooklyn, New York, are among the 36 independent retailers around the country that are helping introduce the wines to their discerning customers, O'Neill says. Others include Zingerman's in Michigan, and Spanish Table, Milk Bar, and Cheese Plus, all in California, and more. The Ribera y Rueda Wine campaign, which is being run by Taste Network in the U.S., provides the retailers with training, educational materials, and other content, including social media, to help them promote the wines. The retailers have been leveraging this support to create their own store-level initiatives, which include tastings, educational classes, displays, and other efforts. At Greene Grape, for example, Michele Thompson, manager, says she loves "getting caught in the minutia and getting nerdy with the wines." The retailer has incorporated the wines into its monthly "Pouroscope," which matches specific wines to customers' zodiac signs, and has tagged songs in its monthly Spotify playlist to accompany the wines, along with food recommendations. "Our customers appreciate the creative ways we think about the business," says Thompson. The wines have also helped Di Bruno Bros. build up its fledgling wine business, which the retailer launched about five years ago. "Not only are our sales of Ribera del Duero and Rueda wines up about 300 percent, but they've helped us become one of the highest-volume wine retailers in Pennsylvania, excluding the state-run liquor stores," says Sande Friedman, category manager at Di Bruno Bros. —Mark Hamstra A Dream Kitchen With a Mission Visionary Alice Waters, restaurateur, chef, activist, and founder of The Edible Schoolyard Project, is ready to build the kitchen of her dreams for her namesake Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education at UC Davis' Aggie Square campus. The kitchen's design will be based on something she saw in England at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. Waters has hand-picked architect Hans Baldauf to bring it to life. The institute's mission will be to teach food literacy to K-12 students (as well as educators and faculty) through interactive kitchen and garden classrooms with the hopes of inspiring public school students to learn to grow and cook using only organic regenerative local food and only in season. Concurrently, Waters' partnership with the UC Davis School of Education will draw experts from education, health care, agriculture, policy, and business fields to gather and create solutions for healthier and more sustainable and equitable food systems. The hope is that research on organic agriculture, carbon-reducing climate solutions, public health scholarship, and environmental education will position the institute to inspire a major shift in the health of local and global communities.—D.S. PHOTO: RIBERA Y RUEDA 14 SPECIALTY FOOD SPECIALTYFOOD.COM TRENDS & HAPPENINGS

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