What pricing teams can learn from a top winemaker | Dan Petroski (Founder, Massican)

What are the price points in wine that people anchor on?

$30 is very expensive. 14.99 is the sweet spot.

14.99, okay.

It's the sweet spot. It is. I listed my Sauvignon Blanc at its current price, $32, and then I showed it at $29.99. I showed at $24.99, 19.99, $14.99. And $14.99 was the winner. That's the average price someone would buy a bottle of, you know, one of the most famous wines in the world. Kendall Jackson, Vintner's Reserve. So people are accustomed to drink getting high quality white wine from California at that price point. So I am pretty much ultra Premium at $30. But what I'm hoping for is that Massican becomes a wine that people trust and that they're willing to pay $30 for it because they can trust the quality and the content that's that's in the bottle.

Hi, everyone. I'm Kristin Berman, and this is the Irrational Mind. This podcast is for product marketing and design people, people who want to know more about how their customers think and get inspired to build and grow products that work. And to do that, we're talking to people who really get human behavior. So, yes, you could talk to five users to improve your onboarding, but why not just take the playbook from a game designer? Yes, you could launch and learn your latest marketing campaign, but why not learn from a dog trainer who has figured out incentive design or a magician who has figured out how to capture our attention? And so today we are talking to a winemaker. Let's start with a basic question. Why is a bottle of wine $14 or $13 or $134? Is a bit of extra taste worth the money and how much money? Wine is a unique market where how the wine is marketed and sold is almost as important, if not more important than how the wine is made. For example. And speaking from experience, price can lead us novice wine drinkers to to assume more expensive wines are inherently better tasting than cheaper ones, regardless of the actual quality. Wine marketing can also lead us to buy based on words used to describe it. So oaky and buttery wine marketing can lead us to buy based on label. How credible does it look? Or if you're me, how fun does it look? Wine is an elite sport and yet an accessible product to everyone. The best analogy I've heard is you can't really charge $30 for a glass of beer, but you can charge $30 for a glass of wine. So what can we learn from winemakers and how they sell their wine? Today we talk to Dan Peterski, the founder of Massican Wines. Massican is an outlier in the red wine heavy Napa Valley. It's a white wine. And so who is Dan to try to sell a white wine in Nepa? Well, he's a marketer and he's a good one. And I'll start with this confession. Like many product people, I can be a bit skeptical of brand marketing. As behavioral scientists, we want people to do something like take an action, and the brand wants you to believe in something. But after listening to Dan, I have a new appreciation for how brand creates value and how creating the brand could also drive someone to change their behavior. Dan's top advice to product folks is to consider the brand and the distribution channels before you start building your product, or in his case, producing his wine. This seems obvious in hindsight, but it's not really a normal concept. In the tech world, we typically build to solve a problem. And while that's reasonable, it does leave many startups without the required enterprise deals. After years of pounding pavement, you built it, but they will not necessarily come. So in this episode, we talked to Dan about how to sell wine from the initial decisions that drive uptake, what product to offer, and the actual marketing of the product after it's produced. For Dan, this meant nailing some of the basics. For him, it was be the only white wine in a certain region at a certain price point. Differentiation was key. It also meant have a vibrant language and storytelling for his brand. This brand building elevates someone from a $14 bottle to a $30 bottle. And I'll argue at the end that he could go even higher. By the way, this is something that wine in particular does very well. It has a wide range of language to describe its taste. We also get into the idea of scarcity. Dan won't admit that scarcity was part of his intentional plan, but it has happened nonetheless. When I interviewed him, his wines were sold out on his website. Just like you can't get a Louis Vuitton on Amazon, you can't get his wine at Safeway. This creates some value, even if it means less scale. So I hope you have a glass of wine while listening. Let's begin. And on a more personal note, my day job is CEO of Irrational Labs. Irrational Labs is a SWAT team of behavioral scientists. We help companies design and build products that customers use, love, and pay for. This podcast is an exploration of behavior change across different domains. If you like it, you may also like working with us. Give me a shout@hellorationallabs.com and mention the podcast and also throw us a bone. I mean, review on Apple or Spotify podcasts. Thank you in advance. It really does help help. Thanks Dan, for joining us today. It is 10am by me, so unfortunately I'm not going to be drinking, but my heart is sipping wine. Maybe you can start by helping folks understand and describe your wine to people listening as if they were drinking it right now. Give us a taste, if you will.

First off, thank you, Kristen, for having me. I am on the east coast and it's one o', clock, so it's lunchtime. So it's I am eligible to have a glass of wine, but I do not have one in front of me at the moment. If I did have a glass of Mastican in front of me, I would describe the wine as my vision for why I started the brand. It is California white wines made in the very Mediterranean style. And when I say that, what I mean is I lived in Sicily for a year and white wines in the Mediterranean are very aromatic. They they're just full of fresh flowers and blossoms and citrus and salt water. And that's really, I think, a wonderful food pairing wine. It's the kind of wines I want to surround myself with on a daily basis.

You've had a fair bit of success selling wine. What is it about how you're selling, what you're doing that's different than other folk? What did you what have you learned across this process?

I learned that first and foremost, I'm a wine drinker. I'm someone who loves to eat and love to drink. And I am also an intimidated wine drinker. Wine because of its complexity that's nuanced because it's made all over the world in multiple places that are even right next to each other. And the wines can be completely different. That it's intimidating. And that is something that we have to break that barrier down. And for me, it's always been about choosing wines at the table that we can simplify and talk to people in a way that gives them confidence. Because if you don't have confidence in what you're drinking, you're going to avoid drinking those bottles of wine. So I've made it a point to simplify it to a level that is just how I feel about wine. And I've noticed that a lot of people around me, whether it be my consumers or my peers, are in the same situation. They feel the same way about wine. And it helps feel connected and confident when they're picking a bottle at a.

Store or off a restaurant, maybe break it down. What do you mean by simplify so tactically? What does that. What does that feel like?

I can be like one of my peers and geek out about wine and talk about the soil and the dirt and what the microbes do to the vine's health and the vine's health to the wine's character. But I just told you that my wines are sunshine in a glass. Sunshine in a bottle, smells like flowers, feels like the Mediterranean Sea. I mean, that simplicity, like people can trigger that. It doesn't have to be the Mediterranean Sea. It could be your vacation to Miami or to the Jersey Shore, where you've had that experience of those smells and those aromas and those flavors. And then that is going to allow you feel a little bit more confident about your ability to understand what something smells like and tastes like in the glass.

So you're basically saying kind of the description is accessible. Is there more like, is there, you know, as somebody who's new to wine and has a lot of options in front of them, why are they picking yours?

It's a number of things. It starts at price. Pricing of wine is really important because if you're not confident in your decision making, you're not going to spend a lot of money for something. And so I wanted to make my wines accessible on price, and I've done that for Napa Valley Winery. The wines are still expensive. Do not get me wrong when I say this. The wines are still $30 to $40 to $50 a bottle in a retail shop or maybe somewhere between seventy and a hundred dollars a bottle at a restaurant. So I think price was important to me because it's again, going back to this intimidation factor. And I'll be honest with you. I totally fucked up when I started Massican. I. I was so intimidated when I was eating and drinking in New York City about mispronouncing French words and phrases that are and names of wines that are on, you know, wine list that I started to read more about wine and learn more about wine. So I was more confident when I went to a business meeting or on a date in a restaurant in New York City. And then I went and I started my own wine brand, and I chose a name that no one could pronounce. I put grape varieties in the bottle that no one can pronounce and. Or don't know what they are. And I had to. I had to rely a lot on referral networks and, and word of mouth. I had to rely on third party reviews and critical reviews and having, you know, success in the publishing industry for 10 years before I got into wine. I have a relationship with a lot of people in, in publishing because I could talk to journalists and writers and reporters on their level.

Okay, so we've got, basically the description of the wine is one factor. You're saying pro price is another. Did you start with 30, $40? Like, how did you pick that price point Initially?

I started with some, my wines at like 24.99, so $25. And then every two years I rate the price 10%. So 25, 27, 29. And then breaking that $30 barrier was huge for me. I actually did it, probably the most awkward time. I did it during the pandemic in March of 2020 when I released my, my 2019 vintage wines. I actually raised my prices. That was a scary risk, but it actually turned out to be one of the better choices I made because wine sales were just, were amazing. I hadn't seen anything like that in 15 years of running the business. So price has gone up over time. Over fifteen years, you know, I've probably seen, you know, a five to seven dollar price increase in my core wines over fifteen years. It's not a very high compound annual growth rate or inflationary rate. So I feel confident about that. A lot of people say that my wines are undervalued for Napa Valley. And I fall back to this intimidation factor that I'm intimidated when I can't pronoun a grape variety or know what a grape variety is or where it's from or what this is supposed to represent in the bottle. So it's important to me to make price not a factor in the value chain of a customer decision.

Got it. And so what's special about this $30? Are there other price points? Kind of like jumping, jumping the chasm into a different kind of segment. What are the price points in wine that people anchor on?

$30 is very expensive. 14.99 is the sweet spot.

14.99, okay.

It's the sweet spot. It is. No, it truly is. And I, and I, I proved it through a control Google advertising set where I listed my Sauvignon Blanc at its current price, $32. And then I showed it at 29.99. I showed it at 24.99. 1999, 14.99 and 14.99 was the winner. And that is, you know, that's the average price someone would buy a bottle of, you know, one of the most famous wines in the world, Jackson Vintner's Reserve. So people are accustomed to drink getting high quality white wine from California at that price point. So I am pretty much ultra Premium at $30. But what I'm hoping for is that Massican becomes a wine that people trust and that they're willing to pay $30 for over time because they, they can trust the quality and the content that's, that's in the bottle.

Love it. And so as somebody who's getting into wine, maybe they're buying the $14, 1499 bottle. What pushes them farther down, like to become somebody who thinks more deeply about choosing their wine, Maybe reads labels, looks it up. Like what is that push that gets me from an average price point drinker to somebody who's more interested?

It's a great question. And the thing, the way I can relate it into another industry or it's not even relating to another industry, it's just relating yourself and your personal human growth and your professional growth. You know, when we were in college, we slept on Ikea futons and then when we had a job for five years to seven years, we went from Ikea to Crate and Barrel. And then now when we're adults and, and have disposable income, we're shopping at Restoration Hardware. So I think the human aspiration is part of the equation here. So as you start to get into wine, you start to appreciate it and start to be curious about it. Hopefully you're curious about it. That's going to allow you to kind of open up your window and your wallet. And it's also, we can't, we have to take, you know, the professional marketplace into consideration. There's a lot of still the wining and dining of the travel and expense budget their corporations still provide their employees. I think that's a really important factor and it was an important factor in how I got into wine because I was wining and dining clients in for 10 years in New York City and I needed to extend my budget and I needed to do that by not buying the most expensive wine on the list to show value or to treat someone valuably. I need to find the best bottle of wine in the list that I can tell a story about, have that content behind it and get them excited about it. So they didn't care about the price. They just got enthusiastic about why they were drinking that wine with me and how I passionate about it. And that helped my T&E budget go a long way. And I think that's a. You have to understand, especially in a city like New York or London, going to be these situations where we are naturally inclined to eat a fancier restaurant and buy fancier wine because of the. The business. Professional relationship.

Yeah, Norms. So basically, you don't want to go into a restaurant with your business colleagues and be like, I. I have no idea how to make this decision. Okay, so if you were to give somebody in that scenario in that seat one tip as they look at the menu, what tip would you give them as they're evaluating their option?

There's a lot of ways to approach that question. Don't be intimidated by the server or their sommelier. Allow them to help you, but give them enough information that they can make a proper decision for you. That's first and foremost. The second thing, if you want to do it on your own. What I did was every great wine brand usually had what we call a second label. Something that they did on the side or something within their portfolio of wines that was unique and different and cheaper. They'll have their top wines, their grand vine, and then they have a second wine that's hundreds of dollars cheaper even, you know, into the double digits of dollar price point. And those are also going to be made by the same winemaking team with the same quality in mind, but they aren't of the quality of their. Their top wine. So I knew that if I was going to a restaurant, I didn't need to buy the $500 bottle of wine. I could buy the $55 bottle of wine, and I could tell the story that it's from people who make the $500 bottle of wine. And that's like, oh, cool. And that's just the extent of the conversation. Smell, tastes great. Boom. Let's talk, you know, let's eat.

Yeah. So that's interesting because you basically have, you know, you have. I'm going to go. You have like, Banana Republic, Old Navy, which are owned by the same company, but completely different styles, cost point, like, price points. So in a different world, they could have been the same brand and just differentiated kind of and said, this is, this is for the, the professionals, and this is for the. The tweens. And so wine has done that. But other. Other brands don't. They really kind of do different names. They differentiate themselves. They're like, we're not the cheap brand. We're not the expensive brand. Why do you think wine can get away with this with one label but having different varieties?

The geekiness of wine is that we love, we love our dirt, we love our, our regions. We love the, the complexities and nuances that our regions can provide us. We also love the diversity of, of our region. So we kind of lean into opportunities and we also have to be, we have to be very mindful of quality assurance. Right? We have to think about the wine's quality. So we have a lot of, we declassify a lot of the wine we make. Mazacanto says all the time. We declassify a lot of the wine I make each year because I'll have 27 different vineyards with 11 different grape varieties and, you know, 150 different barrel fermentations. And, and so I taste everything. And then one might just be, you know, didn't have a good day and it really just didn't ferment properly. And I'm not going to make my final blend at $30 a bottle, but it might make a blend at $20 a bottle. It's good enough to declassify it to that level. And I think this happens all across the wine industry. But yeah, I hear you about the Old Navy to, to, to Jap, to Banana Republic. It's a great example of that value chain because a shirt has a utility. Whether it's a $10 shirt or a hundred dollar shirt, it has a utility. Alcohol has a utility. Where it's a $10 bottle or, or a hundred dollar bottle. It's just, you know, how it makes us feel when we're experiencing that a hundred dollar shirt versus a $10 shirt. The confidence we have of wearing Banana Republic versus Old Navy to a meeting. Confidence we have, you know, being knowledgeable about a bottle of wine on a table, in a restaurant, in a business meeting, or at a date or celebration with your, with your significant other.

I also love the idea of declassifying the. Do winemakers talk about this? The idea that you've like decided that it's not worthy. It actually gives me confidence to buy the wine because I'm like, okay, there's like 20% was declassified. Is that a word that is talked about to consumers?

I don't think so. I think it's a really good point you make that we should be more open and transparent about that during the process. And, you know, I make a lot more wine each year than I put them under cork and in bottle. And it's, it's a hit to the cost of goods. And it's one of the reasons why the wines become expensive is because we're not using everything we make. There's a secondary market where we would have the opportunity to sell some of that wine that someone else would then package up and bottle. But one of the great, great wines of Napa Valley only uses 10% of the wine they make every year. Then you wonder why the bottle costs $1,000 when they release it. Because 90%. They added 90% to their cost of goods to the finished product. And that's a scarcity game as well. They're playing a scarcity game and a quality game, but they're willing to take the risk of making a lot of wine to find the best product at the end of each year.

What have you found or learned about playing the scarcity game? Like what, what, what works?

It's really difficult. And when you, when you're a brand like Mazza Canza that focuses on esoteric and unique Italian white grape varieties, if I'm making 33% of all the toca filano and ribola gela in California, it's really hard for me to declassify and sell that wine if it doesn't really have a secondary market. So what I learned is, you know, I can actually use that juice and use that wine to do something really great for me, which is an alternative product. And that alternative product is, you know, I made vermouth for 11 years, and vermouth is an aromatized wine. So I used my core, I used my declassified wine, I aromatized it, I made it a little bitter, I fortified it, and I sweetened it, and I. And I released it as a commercial product, as an off offshoot to my wine brand. And that was a way for me to take advantage of the value of having this declassified wine that was really valueless in the secondary marketplace.

I guess conveying the scarcity is kind of this art. Like, how do you, how do you say this is from amazing land, that this napoland is very limited? I have, I have some good. I have some good stuff. Like, how are you conveying either or conveying the number, limited number of bottles. What's your strategy there to, like, infer scarcity?

I don't like the word no. When someone asks me to buy my product, I want to do everything in my power to make sure I can provide them the product. As a small business growing, my constraints were around capital. And now I'm in a very fortunate position to have a current partnership with, with E.J. gallo Co. And I'm. I'm going to be able to never say no about having My products. I don't want my product scarce. Scarcity is a great. It's a great business model, but it's not a winning business model for all brands. So for me, I'm. I want more bottles and more tables. I want people to have more experience with my wine, with my style of wine, which has been unique in California in the last 10 to 20 years. So it always pains me when I get an email when someone says, hey, I'd love to come visit you and taste with you in Napa, or hey, where can I find your wines in Arkansas and I have to sell them. We're a small winery at this time, but we're growing. Please stick with us. Please stay in touch. We can't. We are not open to visitors. We are not here to accept you with hospitable hands, or we're not necessarily distributed in your marketplace yet. But please wait, because we're growing. And so that's my kind of answer at this point to the question of, like, how I communicate scarcity. I don't openly say, get this now or it's going to be sold out. That's not. I don't want to tell anyone that.

Yeah, but implicitly you're kind of are because it's not available. So it's interesting to say you actually, just because you're small, that it's. It's inherently scarce. So you may not have to communicate that. But if you have a We're not selling on your website, you're saying, we're not selling wine right now. This actually could infer a level of scarcity. Nice. So maybe let's double click into the story element, because I know you, you've thought a lot about kind of telling stories and editorial. Can you talk about how you've one kind of how you think about that and then where do you tell the stories? Because, like, I'm meeting a bottle of wine on the shelf or in a restaurant, and so how are you getting the stories from you to. To me?

Yeah, that's. That's a good point. And I'm using a couple platforms right now, but for me, my goal with storytelling about was not about wine. It was just like, where do you want to drink a glass of wine? Where do you experience a glass of wine? You know, how many steps does it take to get to a. A glass of Massican from wanting to have a drink, to choosing between a beer or a glass of wine or a cocktail, to choosing a white wine or an alternative white wine that we Chardonnay and Then now, how do you choose Massican? So I try to fit into people's lives. I want Massican to fit into people's lives in multitude of ways. And what I mean by that is I want to meet you where you are. So I want to be able to communicate what we believe are the best Italian films that you should watch on Netflix when you're drinking. That's. I'm creating, writing a cookbook right now on substack Instagram and TikTok. So I'm trying to reach three different marketplaces. You know, one who likes to read, one who likes to visually see things through Instagram and be aspirational, and one who likes to actually engage at a younger level towards, towards consumption of, of content on TikTok. So that's one way of doing it. Email newsletter is, you know, the core of my product and my, my mailing list. So I have two newsletters. One's a cookbook, one's my wine website and then the website itself. And so the one thing I don't do is I don't really sell wine on my, on my communication tool. The best marketing is no marketing. So if I can, if I can make you want to eat a bowl of pasta and drink a glass of white wine and inspire you to do that, hopefully your choice will be Massican when you drink a glass of white wine. And that's the way I've been approaching this since day one. And I want people to build their own confidence through. Yes, you might get Massican through a referral through a friend or sommelier or a newspaper or magazine. But at the end of the day, if you chose to drink that yourself and then you read that this wine was pretty popular and pretty famous and it was on by the glass of XYZ restaurant in New York City that's Michelin starred, then you like I did that, that's my confidence builder. And that to me has been the most important thing is that my customers feel good about their decision to drink Massican. So I try to reach through in so many ways. I mean I have, I have 20 hours of Spotify playlists that are all Mediterranean inspired. We have movie recommendations. You know, I work in the art space with NFTs and so we're just trying to give meet people where they are because wine drinkers aren't just a singular breed of person. They have multiple hobbies and interests just like we do. We all do. And I want to see if you know, if they want a glass of that's really lovely.

You're basically. I mean, I thought I was talking to somebody who makes wine, but really, you. You make a lot of content. You're like a content ma. And that's maybe, maybe one of the biggest insights here is that when you're selling something, you're not just selling the thing, you're selling the story and the narrative around it, which probably from a tech product perspective, we could probably get a little bit better at where it's not that you're signing up for a software subscription service. Like, what else does this say about you, about how you're using? Seems like you kind of take branding from just the logo to the full. The full narrative. Just kind of stepping back. And you've been doing this for a long time. Two things. What advice would you give your. Your prior self, like your, your young self on making and selling wine? And then maybe what advice would you give other new winemakers? So if it's not you, it's other people on and doing something that kind of has. Has pushed your success.

I probably would have, you know, 15 years of working at one company was great. Of that 15 years, 10 to 11 years was Matzican on the side as a side hustle. My advice would've been to, to. To focus on MAH sooner. But I was always, you know, didn't have the capital to do it, unfortunately, at the time. I didn't want to take outside investment at the time. So it took me, you know, it took me a bunch of years to get to that point. But that would be my one piece of advice, is that Masakan would be in a better place today if I took it, took it more seriously and focused on it sooner in my career making wine. I don't want to sound like a jerk. It's easy. Selling wine is hard. Having the ability to come to market with a product that's going to be picked up in a network of distribution or through dtc. DTC is not the answer these days. Everyone thinks it's the answer, that everyone's buying it. You know, most DTC brands that succeed in wine are ones that have built in hospitality, have wine clubs that are. When someone goes to that space and spends an hour and a half with the team and they're drinking the wines and they're looking at vineyards and they're sitting in rocking chairs, they want to join the wine club and they want to. They want that bottle to show up their house four times a year so it reminds them of that vacation that works. That's DTC and it works. But when you're, when you're a brand like Massican, it's word of mouth brand and you're organic, it's really difficult to get a DTC brand off the ground. So starting with the hard part first, starting with year two, year three of where am I selling this? How am I selling it? Who wants to buy this? What is my piece of the pie? Can I grow the pie? Can I steal from the pie? High. Where do I see this wine? In a restaurant or retail? I hate to hate to unromanticize wine because making wine is, is still very mysterious and very romantic. But the reality of it is no one wants to be stuck with a warehouse full of wine that they can't sell.

That's super insightful. But first off, I'm going to call the direct to consumer dtc. And it's an interesting thing that the idea or success of this is you get people to go somewhere, you, you give them wine and then you ask them to sign up for a reoccurring subscription. And like that's the win on how you get people to kind of buy their own wine. So it's, I'm gonna say this nicely, you trap them, get them drunk and then you know, sign the one time, sign the one time form to continue. I love it. So, but if you're not gonna do that then you just need to really form these distribution relationships. And I think that's an interesting insight as well is that in kind of product and tech development, many times we're not thinking about distribution when we're building the product product, where we're building the product, thinking if we build it, they will come sort of thing. Not really our distribution channels at day one or day two. And so you're basically saying for wine if you want to be successful you actually really have to bake in. What are the distribution channels up front?

When I started early on I, I started out with a very small volume of wine. You know, I always said I wanted the demand to, to be greater than the supply. I did that because I didn't want, I wasn't a full time job for me it was a part time job. I didn't need to have stress knowing I sell white wine. No one wants to buy old white wine. You know, they want to buy fresh young white wine. So I always needed to, you know, make sure I was behind the curve. And I also looked at the marketplace. I'm from New York City, so I wanted to sell my one in New York, New York has the most amount of European imported wine. So there's a lot of, already a lot of Italian white wines here, a lot of French white wine, German white wine. So there is already a marketplace here. Or that vertical wine I was making, I just make it from a different place, from California and then Napa Valley itself. I was very fortunate because I was making Napa Valley based wines that restaurants in Napa Valley could say, oh my God, it's not Cabernet. I'm here pouring a lot of cabernet. There's 1600 wineries in Napa Valley and like probably 1500 of them make Cabernet, you know, and then I'm the only white wine winery in Napa Valley and I don't make red wine, I don't make Cabernet. I had a natural affinity to wine buyers at restaurants like the French Laundry, which always was looking for things to pour throughout the course of a nine course tasting venue. So Massican was an alternative to them because they sit there scratching their heads saying, we can't pour four rounds of Cabernet because we don't have four meat courses during this, this progression of food. So I tended to kind of slide in there very nicely, which are my alternative and my diverse offering.

Great. Okay, we're going to wrap up with just one thought exercise for you. So as a, as a behavioral scientist, we tend to think that kind of context drives some decision making. If people have maybe three bottles of wine, they may take the middle one because of we call compromise effect, or if, you know, there's a cheaper one and a non cheap one that they may decide if they're with people they want to impress, they may do something different than if they're with their spouse. And context can drive these decisions. So what if you just raised your price to like 120 bucks a bottle?

I, I've thought about it a lot. Being able to, to get into that kind of rarefied air of defining that this is really important shit that I'm doing, but it's not. And when I started Massican, I also said to myself, my mother, which one of my wines is named after, couldn't afford my, couldn't afford the Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley Cabernet with the wines I, I was making. Her son, she couldn't buy my wines, couldn't afford her, wouldn't, wouldn't even consider paying that price for, for those wines. So I wanted to make a wine that, that was more accessible and priced and more affordable. And I, to This day have, you know, kind of kept my idea that we can, the way Mazicon will work in the long term is if we scale it. And that's why I have this partnership today with Gallow and Family.

Yeah.

And thank you. And, and that's, it's also, I make a wine that there's so many wines in the Mediterranean style, made in the Mediterranean that are so delicious and cheaper than the wine I make today. And so if you really want to like you want to shop for quality, price ratio, you can do a better job buying, you know, a wine from Friuli or from Sicily or from Greece or the south of France, et cetera. And I think that there's, there's that much diversity in the space at prices that my differentiating factor is a unique offering at a great price.

And if someone were to want to, who's listening? Buy your wines, how would they do it?

Well, we'll be launching the website again soon. Right now there's nothing available for sale on the website, so we are quite scarce. We sold out some of the lines already. We're only distributed in 11 states right now. That'll change in the next two to three years. We'll be distributed probably closer to 30 to 40 states. So we will have much more reach and accessibility. But right now we're in a really small tight spot because, and also Mother Nature for the last couple of years is really bad to us with the drought here in California that kept the vines in a very stressed position and product wasn't bountiful, unfortunately. So some, some of my, some of my wine production was lowered due to just the, you know, the slings and arrows of Mother Nature.

Okay, so. Well, I'll wait and maybe just go to, I'll go to, go to French Laundry.

No, but I do it. There's. Yeah, you can find some, you can find Mahan and depending on where you live, you can find it in Whole Foods. Find it your, you know, your fine wine retailer. Hey, just email me. I'm. I'm still a one man show at Makay still. I still the face of the brand. So my team and partners at Gallo are handling a lot of the backend execution of the sales and marketing at this time. But I'm still answering every email. So just shoot me a note on the web or DM me in the socials and I'll be able to help you out. Find a bottle of Moscow.

Thank you for listening. If you like the show, go to irrationalabs.com to say hello to us or post a review on Apple or Spotify. Big thank you to the show's two Jacks. Jack Buer, our writer, and Jack Steger, our genius editor. Until next time.