I've been on a wine kick lately, so when the day finally came to visit Kingston Vineyards I was pretty excited. I hadn't researched the location or viewed any pictures beforehand but when we finally arrived, I was immediately impressed with how gorgeous the surrounding landscape was and how peaceful the entire setting felt. Outside of drinking some really good wines, I was excited to learn about the business and what life was like working at a Vineyard in the countryside of Chile.
We were fortunate enough to have Guy field our questions and give some first hand insight into the business of growing and selling wine grade grapes in Chile before having dinner and tasting Kingston's delicious wines. What I found particularly interesting was that Kingston basically makes wine in order to sell grapes. Only 8% of the company's sales comes from the selling of bottled wine - selling grapes as a third party to other wineries for them to produce wine is much more profitable. Luckily for us, Kingston makes some of their own wines in order to prove the quality of their grapes and thus create more demand for other wine producers, which I thought was an interesting business model.
After learning more about the business, we were able to enjoy dinner discussing what we had learned and sharing good conversations with Hatty, who has been working at Kingston for several years and is an expat from the United Kingdom. Overall, the experience was phenomenal and I can't wait to taste some of the wines that I ordered the same day. Luckily, part of Kingston's business model is direct to consumer sales via its distribution center located in California, which takes some of the bureaucratic steps of getting its products to consumers out of the value stream. Thanks to some creative sales channel management, I was able to save some luggage space and will be enjoying Kingston wines any day now once they arrive on my doorstep!
We were fortunate enough to have Guy field our questions and give some first hand insight into the business of growing and selling wine grade grapes in Chile before having dinner and tasting Kingston's delicious wines. What I found particularly interesting was that Kingston basically makes wine in order to sell grapes. Only 8% of the company's sales comes from the selling of bottled wine - selling grapes as a third party to other wineries for them to produce wine is much more profitable. Luckily for us, Kingston makes some of their own wines in order to prove the quality of their grapes and thus create more demand for other wine producers, which I thought was an interesting business model.
After learning more about the business, we were able to enjoy dinner discussing what we had learned and sharing good conversations with Hatty, who has been working at Kingston for several years and is an expat from the United Kingdom. Overall, the experience was phenomenal and I can't wait to taste some of the wines that I ordered the same day. Luckily, part of Kingston's business model is direct to consumer sales via its distribution center located in California, which takes some of the bureaucratic steps of getting its products to consumers out of the value stream. Thanks to some creative sales channel management, I was able to save some luggage space and will be enjoying Kingston wines any day now once they arrive on my doorstep!