Exploring the Connection Between Wine and OOH Advertising with Brendan Papariello, CEO and co-founder of Viniamo

00:00 *Tim Rowe * Close your eyes for a second and imagine the Italian countryside. Flowing hills, the aromas of fresh bread being baked and wine being poured. Each wine unique to the farm, each farm unique to the region. Generations of family legacy poured into each glass and enjoyed with the people you love most. Okay, got it? Now, wouldn't it be nice if that once in a lifetime wine tour of the regions of Italy could be delivered to your door? To even attempt pulling that off, you'd need to know the right people to talk to. You'd have to earn the trust of families making the wine to create a curated supply of exclusive, hard to find family wines before you could aggregate them and make them available for sale. You'd have to find a way to get customers and then match customers to your supply of great wine and amplify the stories of those customers and winemaking families to make it all a sustainable business. So what does wine have to do with out of home advertising? Well, everything. Because it's as much about wine as it is about simplifying access to a curated supply of hard to find assets, just like brands who want to use the real world as the ultimate canvas that it is. So what can we learn about sharing great wine and building great brands? We're about to find out from Vindiamo CEO, Brendan Pappariello. Brendan, thanks so much for being here. 

01:19 Brendan Papariello Awesome. Thanks so much for having us, Tim. We're really excited to join the pod.

01:27 *Tim Rowe * We love your pod and can't wait to kind of tell our story and we appreciate the platform. Absolutely. I didn't think we'd ever be having a conversation about wine from Italy on a podcast originally designed to be out of home focused. But as soon as we connected and started to have the conversation, I'm sitting here scribbling notes and thinking to myself, oh my gosh, this is just like what we're trying to do But with a obviously beautiful story and wine attached to it, I wonder if we can have a conversation about what elements have led to Vindiamo becoming the brand that it is. But maybe a good place to start is with the origin story.

02:06 Brendan Papariello How did the idea come to be? Yeah, I feel like with a lot of recent startups, it's a similar story for a little bit, right? So this was a COVID idea, I guess we call it. It was that March, April 2020 when everything kind of changed. So I was working in an industry for a fairly large wine and spirits distributor selling to restaurants and kind of on-premise establishments within Pennsylvania. And obviously that whole world shut down, right? So you couldn't go to restaurants and eat. No one was ordering wine at restaurants. A lot of states tried to do takeout cocktails. Oh, right. Yeah, you could get the adult slushie in a cup to go with your burger. Yeah, so there was a lot of cool innovations that came from that. But for me, the industry just shut down. And I think I always had an entrepreneurial mindset. I had added a second major in college that was entrepreneurship. Really just to add a second major, though, I just wanted to be able to say there was this second major I had. It was easy to add on. But I think I always had a love for entrepreneurship. And I don't necessarily think I fit into kind of the larger corporate structure. And really always wanted to do my own thing. So it was really perfect timing. I was really lucky to have a really close family friend in my business partner, Carmen Berardi, who had been involved in kind of importing of Italian wines for a while, just as like a side gig. And he had great connections in Italy, which is incredibly important and kind of give us a much faster route to kind of launch, especially when you couldn't necessarily just jump over to Italy and meet with producers and taste wines. Oh, right. We're still locked down. Yeah, we're still locked down. And Italy obviously had some incredible challenges too, and it seemed to be hit worse than a lot of other countries. So that's how we kind of got started that Carmen and I started texting. I remember sending them texts like, hey, let's chat this week. I know you have these connections. You know, I just kind of thought we can make this and turn this into something. And along the lines of that, we also had recently figured out that there was an ability to get a really beneficial kind of local winery license within the state of Pennsylvania for out of state producers. And for me, that was the key. We had the Italian connection, but with how strict and stringent alcohol laws are in every state, we kind of had this almost loophole-esque concept that we figured out the ability to get this Italian producer a local license.

05:17 *Tim Rowe * Okay, so the license in PA, that allowed you to essentially sell on behalf of the producer in Italy. That was the workaround that you found within the legal structure that kind of unlocked

05:33 Brendan Papariello this. Absolutely. It kind of gave us that direct to consumer avenue for importing wines, which was really

05:41 *Tim Rowe * unique. And had that been done, was there a template for you to follow? Because I know that there was like a two-year wait period. You guys had to wait two years, obviously, with the COVID lockdowns and all that thing. But from a licensure standpoint, from a logistics standpoint, this was not an overnight thing. This wasn't throw up a Shopify site and get your cousin in Italy to send you some wine.

06:11 Brendan Papariello This was a long road to get to where you are. It was a really long process. I think, luckily, we weren't necessarily in a total rush. We weren't like, we need to get this out overnight. We took our time. We wanted to build it properly. But yeah, the process of getting those licenses is long. And for us, this is the first time doing it. I've done it since then, and it's a lot easier because you know what you're doing. Like going back to your question, this had been done, but to a different extent. We noticed that a few other people in Pennsylvania had kind of got this license, but I didn't think personally they were using it to the fullest extent of the advantages. I realized there was a lot of kind of- Oh, interesting. There was more upside to it. There was more upside to it. It didn't seem like e-commerce was really part of the business plan for anyone else that I saw that was doing this. In addition, there was a lot of on-premise restaurant advantages that the license gave us that the other larger wine and spirits distributors didn't necessarily have. So I thought there was a little bit of untapped opportunity with the license and in a market, Pennsylvania that kind of needs some innovation in wine and liquor sales, being kind of a the state-run wine and spirits industry through the PLCB. All the wine and spirits stores look the same. They all kind of have that-

07:56 *Tim Rowe * The PLBC is like the state governing Pennsylvania liquor- Control board, yeah. Control board. Okay, right. So all of the liquor stores in Pennsylvania, you can buy beer at a Walmart, at a gas station, at your grocery store, but if it's wine or liquor, it has to be bought at a state-run store, which is maybe similar to some other states, but just in case listeners, depending

08:19 Brendan Papariello on where you're listening into from around the world, that's what that is. I think there's like 13 or 14 states that have similar laws, but the majority have a

08:30 *Tim Rowe * bit more freedom. So it was finding an opportunity in something that I think oftentimes too, and this is just like an early unlock, which is oftentimes we can associate legalities and licensures with being restrictive, and really what you found was that there was an opportunity to use it to unlock even more value. So have there been other moments like that in building Vignama where you've seen something that maybe traditionally the legacy industry, if you will, has overlooked an opportunity, and you're like, oh my gosh, there's a box of gold sitting right here.

09:07 Brendan Papariello Have you found other opportunities like that? Yeah, I think tied into that same opportunity, the biggest issue we saw that we were kind of trying to solve as we launched this was traditionally alcohol is this three-tiered system, right? Like there's the producer, distributor, and the retailer, and there's a lot of reasons for that. With foreign wineries, I almost see it as a four-tiered system where it's producer, importer, distributor, retailer, and as you hit each of those levels, there's cost added, making that end retail price higher than it needs to be. So we wanted to find this way to connect that end retailer with the producer with none of those added third-party importer distributor fees. And to me, that was kind of the core of why we started this along with everything else we've spoken about. But to me, that was the key. And it's something that I don't think, probably starting with myself, I don't think we talk about enough. I don't think we use it in our marketing enough. I don't necessarily think we portray it to our end customer enough. You're making a transaction with a producer. There isn't this third party in the middle that's adding their 35% markup. So we really think the value of the wines that we offer is almost as high as possible.

10:59 *Tim Rowe * It's just incredible value because you're working directly with the producer. I think it's such a powerful concept of enabling connection as the marketplace. You're facilitating connection that otherwise would have… I don't know that we can absolutely say this, but pretty fair to say probably never would have happened because these are small farms in regional remote parts of Italy. Maybe talk about that. Talk about some of the just really hard to find aspects, the exclusivity. I think that that's part of your story that makes it so special. That regional wine tour in your mind is really… That is what this is.

11:44 Brendan Papariello Yeah, 100%. And it makes me happy thinking about it, honestly. But I think it's my favorite piece of the business is that we have these… Certainly like three families, right? So there's the Ulysses family, the DiGiulio family, and the Bracca family in Italy. All from different regions. So the Bracca is in Veneto in a small town called Bartolino on Lake Garda. The DiGiulio is in kind of an unknown region of Mulise right on the Adriatic coast. And the Ulysses is just a bit north of them in Abruzzo. And it's amazing. There are so many wineries in Italy. I think the number is upwards of 10, 20,000. Wow. We went to Vinitale in March, or end of March, early April, which is the largest Italian wine convention in the world.

12:44 *Tim Rowe * That's market calendars for next year. Yeah. We're going with Brendan. Maybe we should do a Vignamo tour. Vignamo Italian wine experience, I'm just saying.

12:54 Brendan Papariello Yeah. Yeah. But the Vinitale conference, it allows you to really see how many producers there are. Maybe there's 30%, 40% of the producers at this convention. And that's just thousands of producers. There's a full building dedicated to each region in Italy. So there's 20 Italian wine regions within Italy. I think of them almost as like their states. Just like there's a wine map. Yeah. No, 100%. There's a wine map. And each region really has their thing. They're great that they produce their style of wine. So each region is incredibly unique. And we wanted to find producers. And obviously, we started with, luckily, having some connections to Italian families with wineries. They happen to be in these lesser-known areas, which is why we've decided to continue to target those lesser-known areas and partner with families that are making less than 5,000 cases per year or less than 10,000 cases per year. But just small production facilities focused on making great wine that weren't selling in the US prior. Right. So giving them that extension to bring their wines into the US, showcase, obviously, their wines, but showcase their town, their family, their nana that helps them out. You were sharing a story about the internet goes crazy for nana. The internet loves nana. Yeah. So nana is the grandmother of the broncher family in Bartolino Veneto. And I've met her, I guess, just once in person. But she doesn't speak English. She just kind of, you know, she's 85, maybe 86, just kind of walks around the property. They say she's the head taster, always just tasting the Spamante Rosato, her favorite wine. And, you know, she helps out just, you know, talking with, you know, some of the people visiting for tourism. That's a big part of probably the biggest part of it. It's interesting being on the lake in northern Italy. It's a lot of tourism from other European countries. But yeah, the internet, social media, they love nana. We love telling nana story. And that's kind of where it clicked into place. Like, our, you know, followers, or seeing what we're doing, they want to hear about, you know, the families producing the wine. And they want to see them, you know, visually.

15:53 *Tim Rowe * So sharing pictures and videos, which, you know, something I need to get better at is, you know, getting those pictures and stories and videos, you know, more on social or, sorry, email or on our website, and just kind of showcasing them more. But it's clear that, you know, people want to hear about these families. And that's interesting too, as you were saying, it wasn't something that I had previously considered that with tourism being also such a driver of business to these regions, and then obviously down to the farms themselves, that really your platform is, it becomes an awareness platform for these producers that otherwise they had, how would I have learned about nana before going to Italy without Vignamo? And that translates very directly to out of home, not just out of home as an ad format, in that it solves awareness as a challenge, but that we're going through a lot of those same challenges. It's the small media company that's been family owned, that has operated regionally, these same types of challenges. What have you seen from the feedback, the feedback from the families who are a part of this? What's the impact been like for them participating in this platform?

17:17 Brendan Papariello Yeah, I mean, they love having their wines in the US market. You know, we're really kind of Pennsylvania focused, we are able to shift to a couple different states, but the vast majority of our businesses is within Pennsylvania. And, you know, they love having their wines in the US. It really means a lot to them. I mean, the US when we travel and we get outside the US, I think we understand better what other kind of countries and regions think of the US as being this kind of like, you know, mecca business and just like the, you know, the home of, you know, just ideas and marketing and, you know, big business and, you know, generating money and economy. No matter what is actually happening here, that's kind of what people, you know, outside of the US seem to think of the US. So it means a lot to them. I think it means not only a lot to the families that we're partnered with, but, you know, their neighbors and their community. You know, we seem to get a lot of Italian followers to like our Instagram. And, you know, I'll follow them back or check out their page. And I see they're, you know, they live in the town that one of our producer partners kind of has their winery. So it's cool to see, you know, them kind of latch on to what we're doing here. And just for speaking with them, I know that it gives them just a sense of pride. And, you know, we strive to be as authentic as possible in everything we do. I think, you know, especially where we're located, kind of mid-Atlantic, northeast, there's a lot of like Italian-American things going on. And, you know, a lot of popular things like the Sopranos or, you know, things like that. And we try to be as authentically actually-

19:22 *Tim Rowe * Growing up, Gaudi, there was a whole generation of us that had a lot of hair gel and blowouts. So, yeah, no, it absolutely is. How many, yeah, all of those elements in the festivals and especially for the folks that are in New York City, I'm sure, right? Like we've got, yeah, we've got little Italy. It is absolutely a big piece of the culture here in the northeast.

19:47 Brendan Papariello Yeah, and I think there's like, you know, there's some people that kind of have that more Americanized Italian kind of marketing. And then there's that, you know, authentic kind of truly what's going on in Italy, you know, marketing. And we really want to stay on like, you know, this is, you know, true authentic Italian. Authenticity, yeah. You know, this is what's actually happening at the Weiner. This is what, you know, their cuisine is like, it's not always, you know, chicken parmesan as much as I love chicken parm and chicken piccata, my favorite. But like, it's different over there. And we try to, and I think people understand that when they travel there, right? Which has been like kind of going back to what you said, like there's this whole tourism connection that we haven't totally figured out yet. But like, we've been able to meet people here in Philly who are traveling to Italy and actually set them up for, you know, tours at the Weiner. And prior to us having this business, they wouldn't necessarily have a way to purchase the wine. You can't always just ship wine from Italy to the US. If you can, it's super expensive. So kind of making a connection to that post-Italy trip, like purchase conversion here in the States. It's something that we haven't totally figured out, but it's definitely like the long-term

21:06 *Tim Rowe * plan. Talk about the product specifically for a few minutes, because I'm sure that this audience is full of wine drinkers who at this point have probably gone to the website and are filling themselves in, maybe filling up a shopping cart already. But what is the product itself? What do you get as a customer?

21:27 Brendan Papariello Yeah, so we've got a portfolio of about 21 wines currently, split between the three regions, four wines from Abruzzo. In Abruzzo, we have some Montepulciano di Brutto, so very popular kind of dark red, bold, Italian red wine that I find that the older generation loves, like people's grandparents were drinking Montepulciano di Brutto. So we've got a couple of really cool, just kind of classic Montepulciano di Brutto. So those from the South in Belize, like I mentioned earlier, it's totally unknown region. It's the newest Italian region. They broke off from Abruzzo in 1976. They're disrespected. No one recognizes them. Even in Italy, they're like the underdog. And they've got some really cool organic wines. I think we've got like eight or nine wines from them, but all organic farming, you know, I think they've got 100 hectares of land. They keep 20 just for like, you know, vegetables that they actually provide to like just their local community restaurants and whatnot. But they've got some really unique grapes like Tintilla. You know, it's a grape that's only grown in Melize. You won't find it anywhere else. Oh, wow. It's got a little bit of like a Spanish connection. But I showed that to like, you know, super wine educated like Psalms here in Philly, New York, and most people haven't tasted it before. Wow. They've never heard of the grape. So I love having like something kind of new and different, unique. And then we get up in the north to the Broncher family in Bartolino. You know, they've got some really like just classic solid grape wines. You know, it's not like they're not organic. They're not natural. To me, they're just like classic Italian wines. You know, it's the home of Pinot Grigio. Not the most exciting wine, but just really solid, great price. You know, they've got some like Amarone style reds, some really light chillable reds, and some super aromatic classic like Italian white. So we've got a good variety. And kind of going back to like choosing these producers in these smaller towns, we've got some grapes that people aren't super familiar with. And that's what we like. You know, you know, eventually we'll have Brunello de Montecinos and Barolos and Chianti's, you know, probably a necessity to have, right? But we want our bread and butter to be these kind of different, more unique grapes and introducing them to the consumers here.

24:11 *Tim Rowe * I so resonate with that. I recently launched a directory, a network of these hard to find, exclusive, smaller media players. It's called triadscout.com. There's my shameless use of the platform to plug my own thing. You can check out triadscout.com if you're looking for media companies that sound a lot like that, which I think is just so relevant. You talked about it's three families from three regions, but so much variety within just that combination. Like, yeah, there's a lot that you can do when you know the right places to go and what to look for and where the holes in the market are. How cool of a feeling must that be when you're introducing wine to people who, that's their entire life and they are surprised by something that you introduced to them. That must be a cool feeling.

25:04 Brendan Papariello Yeah, I did it yesterday and I loved it. It's a great feeling. It's a mic drop moment. Especially at some of the more higher end, like, you know, really swanky places. It gives us just almost an in to get in the door of like, hey, we got something like, you know, really cool, really unique. You know, even if you guys aren't interested, I just want you to taste it. And it just kind of starts off that relationship. So, you know, I didn't until we had it in our hand here in the States, like I didn't really know much about the grape or, you know, I didn't know that was necessarily going to be the case, but the wine's fantastic and it's such a good story.

25:42 *Tim Rowe * It's incredible. It is a great story. I'm so grateful that you gave us an opportunity to share in some of that here. If folks want to get in touch, if they want to learn more about the company, the product, they want to get some wine themselves, give them the lat long. That's what we use for directional here in the world of offline out of home advertising. How do folks get in touch?

26:04 Brendan Papariello Yeah. So we have our websites, www.viniamo.co. Make sure to link to that. Our Instagram, you know, it's the same. It's viniamo.co. You know, when we're building that website, you know, dot com's not always available. So we love having the dot co and yeah, we, you know, I would imagine a lot of kind of your listeners are outside of where we can ship. You know, we're hoping to expand that in the near future, but currently we can ship wines to, you know, Pennsylvania, obviously New York, Washington, DC, Florida and California, and hoping to kind of expand on that in the near future. Well, you know what, if you are in the affiliate area, we have a couple of shops.

26:52 *Tim Rowe * That's right. You have a physical store in… We do. Yeah. Down that way. So that's all on the website too? Yeah. I'm guessing. Cool. The aside I was just going to add to that is, I'm just going to pause this and come back to it and snip it out. Crap, what the hell was I about to say? Shit. You were saying something. I apologize. Talking over you popped into my head and it was like…

27:19 Brendan Papariello Probably shipping related.

27:21 *Tim Rowe * What the hell were we just talking about? States. States, shipping. Fuck. Oh, okay. I got it. Cool. Thanks for working with me on that. Brendan, just what I was going to mention in that, and here's my selfish ask. Maybe this is a way to start building the Megazord that is vignamo.co.co. Maybe give us the official Italian wine tour map for that global audience that maybe can't buy and have the wine shipped to their door. Tell us where to go. Give us the inside track on all the good stuff. There's your big ask from us on the global

28:11 Brendan Papariello stage. Tell us where to go. Yeah. I would say you got to go to Lake Garda. When I think of Italy, Lake Como gets a ton of attention. Really expensive. I would say Lake Garda. Just kind of bigger lake, more places to stay, less American tourists, a little bit more kind of German, Austrian tourism, but just unbelievable views. Amazing place. Not far from Milan or Venice. I think Verona is an unbelievable city. I would go Lake Garda, just shoot right down to Verona. It's kind of like a mini Florence. Gives you a really good small town feel. After I left Verona, I was like, I should just move here. It was unbelievable. I think the north in general is a bit less visited. The south having Rome, I think just has a lot of people kind of hanging down Tuscany and south. In general, Tuscany's, you could call it the goat of American Italian tourism. It just seems to be where everyone goes. There's unbelievable lines, really scenic. Tuscany's amazing. But I think the north's a bit untapped. I think the Piemonte kind of on the western side

29:44 *Tim Rowe * of, or northwestern side of Italy, and that Veneto, Friuli, northeast is just unbelievable. I think the north in spring, fall, can't beat it. Great wines, great scenery. The whole country's amazing. It's just like, you need a couple years to just bop around the whole country. It's unbelievable. It's amazing. Amazing. Thank you for sharing the story of not only the families, but of the brand and of the company. Brendan, thanks so much for being here. Thanks, Tim. We really appreciate it. Absolutely. If you found this to be helpful, please share it with somebody who could benefit. As always, make sure to smash that subscribe button and leave the podcast review wherever you're listening. That's how you help us grow. We'll see you all next time.