There seems to be no shortage of wine in California, but there definitely aren’t enough winemakers with access to the marketplace. A new SoCal-based wine venture, Go There Wines, is dedicated to expanding the collective wine horizon. It’s highlighting grape varieties, growing regions, uncommon wine blends, and the stories of the growing network of global winemakers it works with.
Restaurateur Rose Previte founded the company with her husband, former Morning Edition co-host David Greene. While living abroad in Moscow, the couple fell in love with hard-to-find Georgian wine that was embargoed by Russia, and realized that “wine can be geopolitical.”
Upon returning home, Previte began spotlighting Georgian wine in her restaurant, and in the process stumbled across many other incredible winemakers whose products never make it to American shelves.
“As I got into the purchasing, I realized there’s a lot of other countries that are lesser known in the American market, that [produce] super high quality, delicious wines, with amazing winemakers who have amazing history and phenomenal stories,” she says.
Working with winemakers from Georgia, South Africa, and Previte’s ancestral homeland of Lebanon, Go There Wines has created a virtual hub where these winemakers’ products can be sold. In addition to paying producers upfront for their costs, they plan to return 25% of profits to the makers and their communities, so that they can continue to expand their businesses in the years to come.
California-based winemaker Tara Gomez, who hails from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, runs Camins 2 Dreams winery with her wife Mireia Taribó. She says that working as a small wine producer within a largely white and male-dominated wine industry has posed challenges.
Collaborating with Go There Wines has helped make the upfront costs a little less burdensome. And she hopes the profits will help their business grow too, right along with their grapes.
“That upfront money, it helps pay for grapes,” says Gomez. “It also helps us to dream a little bit, because the next dream of ours is to be able to have a piece of land that we could lease and grow our own grapes.”