Newsletter
Our 2005 and 2006 Zinfandel vintages received Silver Medals at this summer’s Orange County Fair International Wine Competition. We put these medals along side our Gold Medal we previously won for our 2007 Zinfandel at the last Sonoma County Harvest Fair. Wine Enthusiast Magazine published an 87 points score for this wine in their June issue this summer. This was the fourth highest score given to a Zinfandel all year. Dashe Cellar’s prized Todd Vineyards Zinfandel received 86 points in the same issue. In other tastings, such as Wine & Spirits Magazine, this same wine received 94 points and represents Dashe Cellar’s best.
We just finished bottling 1,956 cases of our 2009 Leonhardt Vineyards Estate Reserve. This exquisite wine is 85.2% Zinfandel and 14.8% Petite Syrah. Michael Dashe and his team believe this may be the best wine they have ever produced in their more than 20 years in the business. I participated in the blend tasting myself and can tell you I believe we are going to move up from Gold Medal to BEST IN CLASS with this wine at the next Harvest Fair competition. Additionally, we are still aging 3,000 gallons of the Watson Vineyard Old Vines Zinfandel to be bottled late. We also have a large quantity of un-bottled Petite Syrah, which we are considering bottling separately.
Our current inventory case counts are as follows:
2005 Silver Medal Winning Zinfandel 542 cases
2006 Silver Medal Winning Zinfandel 60 cases
2007 Gold Medal Winning Zinfandel 1,089 cases
2008 Zinfandel 2,140 cases
2009 Zinfandel (Our Best Vintage) 1,956 cases
Total 5,787 cases
The un-bottled Watson Zinfandel and Leonhardt Petite Syrah will produce another 1,300 cases when bottled. This will bring our case total to 7,087.
With our website-published retail price of $48 a bottle, this is a $4,082,112 value of wine in inventory.
We have also been offered great grapes at great prices from a number of other growers in our valley and other surrounding valleys. These growers really believe our advertising campaign has been effective and want to join with our brand. If we get our sales up, we could be ready to deliver 10,000 cases next year, if demand is there for our brand.
Drew Bayer, our National Sales Manager, and Justin Weathers, his assigned representative in Pennsylvania, landed the largest single order in our history. Nearly 900 cases of our 2006 Zinfandel was sold and delivered to over 77 stores throughout the State of Pennsylvania. Steve Pollack, the Wine Buyer for the PLCB network of wine stores, placed us on his exclusive Chairman’s Select List, which included a special Chairman’s Select display at all stores. Here, below are his published comments on our wine…
“Don’t confuse this great California Zinfandel with the high-alcohol, port-like styles that dominate the category, or, worse, with white zin. This wine is medium-full-bodied, lush and velvety, with raspberry, chocolate, black berry and cherry, medium alcohol and tannins. Finishes with hints of spice and sweet strawberry vanillan. I keep a notebook with the few wines I taste that really leave a lasting impression. This one made the list.”
–PLCB Wine Buyer Steve Pollack
Leonhardt Vineyards is about to reach full circle in our first-ever year of participating in wine festivals. Our first festival was the Sonoma Wine Weekend that took place in September of 2009 at the McMurray Ranch in Sonoma County. This marked the very beginning of our marketing and sales campaign, after more than 10 years of preparation. With patience, we executed on a strategy to build up an inventory level large enough to justify a proper launch campaign. We did so by warehousing our 2005, 2006, and 2007 vintages for a late 2009 launch. To our luck, the 2005 and 2006 vintages greatly improved with bottle aging of three and four years.
We participated in nearly two-dozen festivals during the year including: the Sonoma County Harvest Fair, Avatar Earth Day, Casa Pacifica, Malibu Schools, Vintage Hollywood, the San Diego Wine & Food Festival, the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, the Aspen Wine & Food Festival, and the ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates and Producers) Festivals in Denver, San Francisco, Orange County, and Hawaii. We also participated in eight San Francisco Giants events, including two Picnics in the Park, and three festivals in New York. Nikki Novak, our National Spokesperson and Brand Ambassador led the festival events. Nikki was instrumental in getting the Lauber Imports division of Southern Wine & Spirits, in New York, to sign us at a time when they were cutting back. Lauber ordered a full pallet of our 2007 Zinfandel at full wholesale price.
The first half of 2010, our 10th anniversary since purchasing Leonhardt Vineyards, has been our very first advertising push to get our brand recognized above the noise of thousands of available brands. This six month time period represented the first in our 10-year history that we have invested in advertising. We are commissioning a customer wine brand recognition survey in the San Franciso Bay area and will report the results shortly. We are confident that we have moved from being completely unknown to being amongst the top 100 most recognized wine brands in the area.
Leonhardt Vineyards is the lead wine sponsor of the San Francisco Giants baseball club. We have two large panel advertisements behind home plate at AT&T Park. These signs rotate every half inning. Our signs have appeared in 42 of 56 home games so far this season. We average approximately 20 minutes of TV exposure time each appearance. This time is 75% prime time and 25% non prime time. We have received 860 minutes of our Leonhardt Vineyards logo and website address exposure on TV this year. The Giants have had their best record in baseball since the All-Star break, and they are solidly in position to make the playoffs, now three games ahead of the nearest competitor. We picked a winner to back! San Francisco is the gateway to wine country and the most sophisticated wine market in the USA. Our wine is sold at multiple stands at AT&T Park and at a number of surrounding wine shops and restaurants. Cellars of Sonoma told us that a big part of their decision to take our wine into their tasting room and store was due to our incredibly effective advertising support program, which makes their job of selling our wine easier.
Leonhardt Vineyards also sponsored Wine Country Baseball, www.winecountrybaseball.com, a 12 team league with an emphasis on raising funds for local charitable causes. This has greatly increased the exposure of our brand in Wine Country and has built goodwill in our community. Leonhardt Vineyards Wine Country Baseball ad signs now appear in the windows of over 200 shops in Napa and Sonoma counties. The league has had multiple page articles, including front-page coverage in the largest circulation newspaper in Wine Country. The Press Democrat has covered us three times over the course of this summer. We have also had a wrap-around ad in two issues. We’ve had over 2,000 radio spots, 200 TV spots, 40 newspaper spots, and 200 ads in front of movies in Sonoma and NAPA counties. Two local TV shows have done pieces on our league, and a producer has filmed a pilot for a reality TV series based on our Petaluma Piratas team. We are in the process of selling 11 of our12 franchises at price ranges between $280,000 and $680,000 each. We expect to bring in $4,400,000 from these sales over the next year. Our closest competition, the North Woods league in Minnesota, is selling franchises for over $1 million each. The Golden League in California is selling the Orange County Flyers franchise for $3 million. The Santa Jose Giants, in the California Class A league, have a price tag of $9 million. Our league location is much more attractive for visiting baseball scouts, players, and coaches. Our low cost business model is ideal during this economic recession with less risk to owners. We are keeping the ownership of the Santa Rosa team, our premier franchise. The league is operating in the black, excluding the start up introduction advertising expenses. Each weekend, we bring in between $1,200 and $4,500 and we spend under $1,000. Wine Country Baseball LLC was spun out of Leonhardt Vinyards LLC this month and now is an independent organization. Garrett Hoelscher, the leagues’ Commissioner and General Manager, has done an excellent job this summer. We just surpassed 5,000 fans this past weekend! Momentum for the league is growing as the word spreads on our affordable family entertainment.
This summer we opened our tasting room, by appointment only, at the beautiful setting of our 8500 Dry Creek Road property. Sarah Morgenstern, our Zintern from Florida, set up and managed the tasting room operations. Sarah’s enthusiasm was contagious to the entire team. She brought many innovations to the organization. We are really happy that she has decided to move to Sonoma County to join us full time. In addition to selling our own wines in the tasting room, we also offer Valdez Family and Bartz-Allen wines. Craig Hill led a major renovation effort. Our tasting room atrium and full building was completely re-painted in bright new colors. We placed stone all over the front of the tasting room building to create a Tuscan villa type look. We planted vines all over the side of the building with scaffolds, bringing them four foot up the wall. We also planted an apple tree and 530 ft high maple trees. We created a large patio area on the north side of the building where we are placing a Bocce ball court “the game of vintners”. Come visit!
Ryan Leonhardt visited from Florida this summer to help us launch the tasting room and Wine Country Baseball. He has been working diligently to promote our wines in Florida and Minnesota and to drive Wine Club membership enrollment in those two states. Ryan also has been leading our efforts to secure a contract with distributors in those two states and has met with a number of candidate organizations. Throughout the year, our wine has been presented at a number charity events in Florida, under Ryan’s leadership.
Adriana Burruel has landed a number of accounts for Leonhardt Vineyards in Northern California and stands as our fourth highest selling salesperson in the organization.
Our goal is to reach $500,000 in sales by years end. We are at $200,000 right now. We are registered to sell in the following states:
Minnesota
Illinois
Massachusetts
Nevada
Hawaii
New York
Florida
California
New Hampshire
Colorado
Pennsylvania
We are working on Texas this week. In some of the States above we can only sell to wine club members; we are waiting to get a distributor or to establish our own distribution company. In New York, Colorado, and Pennsylvania we have solid distributors.
Lori Florence was hired, earlier this year, to conduct follow up calls to all of the people who gave us their information at the wine festivals we attended. She has quickly become the second highest grossing sales person on our team. Lori is the daughter of Jack Florence Sr., the legend of Dry Creek Valley. Her father published a history book on Dry Creek Valley that highlighted our location as the first site for a winery in Dry Creek Valley, back in the 1800s. The original pioneers chose the prettiest best spot in the valley, just as we did more than 100 years later.
We now have more than 1100 members in our Leonhardt Vineyards Fan Club on Facebook. We are working to convert many of them into becoming full-fledged Leonhardt Vineyards Wine Club Members. Sarah and Drew redesigned our wine club membership program and developed a full slate of support materials and website links. If you want to join email Drew at drew@leonhardtvineyards.com
Our wine is available at more than 25 retail locations in California. Most of them are listed on our web site.
Sunday, October 3rd , is our Harvest Party. It will be held at the 8500 Dry Creek Road vineyard for Leonhardt Vineyards Wine Club Members. This is in conjunction with the Harvest Fair that will take place at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds the same weekend. We will have great food, great wine, great company, and great music! Be sure to sign up for a Leonhardt Vineyards Wine Club Membership online to participate.
Blog Written by Howard J Leonhardt- Owner & Founder of Leonhardt Vineyards- A California Winery Specializing in Zinfandel Wines
