Skip Coomber, 53, a Rancho Santa Fe attorney to “ultra-high-networth” clients, and a serial entrepreneur of tech and retail companies, did what can be done for fun and ultimate status, at least in California. He started a winery: Coomber Family Ranch Wines.
The Coombers — Skip, wife Maureen, 45, and daughters Amelia, 18, and Caroline, 16 — changed the traditional vintner game by bringing a high-tech approach to manufacturing, then adding a sweet giveback model to the marketing.
Their pets — horses, dogs, rescue cats — grace the labels, and 5 percent of the sales is returned to the animal organization the buyer chooses. Their prizewinning cabernet sauvignon features their skateboarding bulldog Maggie.
Coomber Family Ranch Wines was launched in 2009 and went to market in November 2013. The Coombers got lucky right out of the barrel, scoring 95 points (out of 100) on a review from Wine Enthusiast for their 2010 private reserve Rutherford Cabernet Sauvignon.
At the recent San Diego International Wine Festival, Coomber talked to the U-T about how he did it. (Then we drank the wines.)
Q: What was it like to get a 95-point rating with your first batch? That’s like having your first novel be a No. 1 best-seller.
A: I almost fell out of my chair when we got the call. Anything with a 9 in front of it would have been incredible, to validate that we were making real wine. The taster gives a 95 to fewer than 2 percent of the wines he samples.
Q: What does that mean for sales?
A: The supplier of those grapes had told us we could not sell for less than $125 a bottle. We figured a new winery, how could we ever justify that price? The magazine told us to be prepared. There are people who do nothing but order wines with that rating from new wineries.
Q: That’s a pretty stiff price, though, for many consumers.
A: We have wines that sell as low as $12 by the glass all the way up to $100-$200 a bottle at a fine dining restaurant such as Pamplemousse, Mille Fleurs, Mister A’s or The Bridges — places like that.
Q: Why do you have horses on the pinot noir and where do those cats on the chards come from?
A: With respect to marketing, first of all we are animal lovers — that is genuine, and we wanted to give back.
Then we realized that worked for business. Someone goes into the restaurant and the server tells them, “Oh, I saw these people, we have their wine, it’s very good, they are local and they donate to the animal charities.” So people naturally gravitate towards that, all else being equal.
Q: Which charities are those?
A: Helen Woodward, Rancho Coastal, San Diego Humane Society, San Diego Labrador Retrievers and more.
On our chardonnay bottle we have our three black-and-white cats. Two of them are rescue cats from Rancho Coastal. One of them named Lucky we found out in the desert in Utah on the side of the road. On our pinot noir bottles we have two horses — my wife has a trail horse and my daughter competes with Morgan horses — and on our cabernet bottles we have our two dogs, our black lab Murphy and our skateboard-riding bulldog Maggie.
Q: How did you teach a bulldog to skateboard?
A: When she was a puppy, she just started pushing around the board. She became more curious, put her foot up on it, and right before our very eyes she started riding the thing. She got better over time, and now she can steer it. Bulldogs are tenacious. When Maggie gets excited and wants to ride her board, you can’t keep her away from it.
Q: What is a high-tech approach to making a 95-point wine?
A: First, we take less risk by not owning the vineyard but instead contracting for the best grapes. Then we surround our huge tanks with an outside layer where we pump in liquid nitrogen, to keep the temperature exactly at the point we want during each step of the fermentation process. Full-time scientists watch over the process. And we buy fantastic grapes and pay top dollar for our new French oak barrels.
Q: Does the search for a competitive edge come from your background as an entrepreneur?
A: I have done a technology company, I have a law business, I do a lot of investing myself, and I have three different funds — venture capital funds, private capital and real estate funds.
You always want to find somebody that has competitive edge. I felt I had a competitive edge out of the gate, with the people I know, and with the custom crush plant, and the ability to buy. Our supplier — Beckstoffer Vineyards — is selective with respect to who they will sell to, and our plant manager ran Stag’s Leap Wine Company for 20 years.
Q: What companies have you been involved with?
A: I was on the board of directors of the public company Big Dogs, a retailer with 220 stores. Then I was the lead investor and CEO of HEROware, a software company that sold an enterprise solution into the small- and medium-business market. Their main product backs up Microsoft servers on-site and into the cloud. I morphed into a personal service attorney helping wealthy people with the aspects of their lives that are generally more complicated because they are wealthy.
Q: What’s next in the cutting-edge wine world?
A: Controversy. For thousands of years wine has been “fined” to take the bitterness out, and one method is to use egg white, one per barrel. A barrel has 300 bottles worth of wine in it. There has to be some residue and there are people who are true vegans who won’t tolerate that. People will want to know everything that went into their wine, not just the sulfites.
Q: Do you have an exit strategy?
A: The big liquor companies are always looking for something with a hook, something they can use the dollar to scale, but right now we are just building our brand and having fun. Who knows, maybe all this will create a profession for one or both of our daughters.
Michael Ma helped with research for this article. Contact Steve Chapple at stevechapple.com
© Copyright 2014 Steve Chapple
The Coombers — Skip, wife Maureen, 45, and daughters Amelia, 18, and Caroline, 16 — changed the traditional vintner game by bringing a high-tech approach to manufacturing, then adding a sweet giveback model to the marketing.
Their pets — horses, dogs, rescue cats — grace the labels, and 5 percent of the sales is returned to the animal organization the buyer chooses. Their prizewinning cabernet sauvignon features their skateboarding bulldog Maggie.
Coomber Family Ranch Wines was launched in 2009 and went to market in November 2013. The Coombers got lucky right out of the barrel, scoring 95 points (out of 100) on a review from Wine Enthusiast for their 2010 private reserve Rutherford Cabernet Sauvignon.
At the recent San Diego International Wine Festival, Coomber talked to the U-T about how he did it. (Then we drank the wines.)
Q: What was it like to get a 95-point rating with your first batch? That’s like having your first novel be a No. 1 best-seller.
A: I almost fell out of my chair when we got the call. Anything with a 9 in front of it would have been incredible, to validate that we were making real wine. The taster gives a 95 to fewer than 2 percent of the wines he samples.
Q: What does that mean for sales?
A: The supplier of those grapes had told us we could not sell for less than $125 a bottle. We figured a new winery, how could we ever justify that price? The magazine told us to be prepared. There are people who do nothing but order wines with that rating from new wineries.
Q: That’s a pretty stiff price, though, for many consumers.
A: We have wines that sell as low as $12 by the glass all the way up to $100-$200 a bottle at a fine dining restaurant such as Pamplemousse, Mille Fleurs, Mister A’s or The Bridges — places like that.
Q: Why do you have horses on the pinot noir and where do those cats on the chards come from?
A: With respect to marketing, first of all we are animal lovers — that is genuine, and we wanted to give back.
Then we realized that worked for business. Someone goes into the restaurant and the server tells them, “Oh, I saw these people, we have their wine, it’s very good, they are local and they donate to the animal charities.” So people naturally gravitate towards that, all else being equal.
Q: Which charities are those?
A: Helen Woodward, Rancho Coastal, San Diego Humane Society, San Diego Labrador Retrievers and more.
On our chardonnay bottle we have our three black-and-white cats. Two of them are rescue cats from Rancho Coastal. One of them named Lucky we found out in the desert in Utah on the side of the road. On our pinot noir bottles we have two horses — my wife has a trail horse and my daughter competes with Morgan horses — and on our cabernet bottles we have our two dogs, our black lab Murphy and our skateboard-riding bulldog Maggie.
Q: How did you teach a bulldog to skateboard?
A: When she was a puppy, she just started pushing around the board. She became more curious, put her foot up on it, and right before our very eyes she started riding the thing. She got better over time, and now she can steer it. Bulldogs are tenacious. When Maggie gets excited and wants to ride her board, you can’t keep her away from it.
Q: What is a high-tech approach to making a 95-point wine?
A: First, we take less risk by not owning the vineyard but instead contracting for the best grapes. Then we surround our huge tanks with an outside layer where we pump in liquid nitrogen, to keep the temperature exactly at the point we want during each step of the fermentation process. Full-time scientists watch over the process. And we buy fantastic grapes and pay top dollar for our new French oak barrels.
Q: Does the search for a competitive edge come from your background as an entrepreneur?
A: I have done a technology company, I have a law business, I do a lot of investing myself, and I have three different funds — venture capital funds, private capital and real estate funds.
You always want to find somebody that has competitive edge. I felt I had a competitive edge out of the gate, with the people I know, and with the custom crush plant, and the ability to buy. Our supplier — Beckstoffer Vineyards — is selective with respect to who they will sell to, and our plant manager ran Stag’s Leap Wine Company for 20 years.
Q: What companies have you been involved with?
A: I was on the board of directors of the public company Big Dogs, a retailer with 220 stores. Then I was the lead investor and CEO of HEROware, a software company that sold an enterprise solution into the small- and medium-business market. Their main product backs up Microsoft servers on-site and into the cloud. I morphed into a personal service attorney helping wealthy people with the aspects of their lives that are generally more complicated because they are wealthy.
Q: What’s next in the cutting-edge wine world?
A: Controversy. For thousands of years wine has been “fined” to take the bitterness out, and one method is to use egg white, one per barrel. A barrel has 300 bottles worth of wine in it. There has to be some residue and there are people who are true vegans who won’t tolerate that. People will want to know everything that went into their wine, not just the sulfites.
Q: Do you have an exit strategy?
A: The big liquor companies are always looking for something with a hook, something they can use the dollar to scale, but right now we are just building our brand and having fun. Who knows, maybe all this will create a profession for one or both of our daughters.
Michael Ma helped with research for this article. Contact Steve Chapple at stevechapple.com
© Copyright 2014 Steve Chapple
