SAN FRANCISCO COMMUITY FEATURE IN GOOD TASTE WINES W

ine is scary. For the average consumer, the world of wine feels like some lofty, exclusive club. Some of us simply don’t know whether we are supposed to swirl or sniff first, taste nothing more than “notes of grape” and “swear that the two-buck-chuck tastes just like that fancy stuff.”

“It can be really intimidating when you're walking up and down the wine aisle of your local Whole Foods and see 400 different wines with names that you can barely pronounce,” says Zach Feinberg, co-founder of In Good Taste Wines. “If you're spending over $40 for a bottle, that becomes a risky bet. We don’t believe that the world of wine needs to be so intimidating.”

Zach Feinberg and Joe Welch founded In Good Taste Wines on that very belief. Neither of them had a wine background, or “really knew anything about wine.” The duo met as early employees of Doordash, both tasked with starting DoorDash from scratch in a new city every 2-6 months.

“I always had a desire in the back of my head to start a company. DoorDash was essentially teaching me how to start a company on somebody else's dime,” says Feinberg. After experiencing burnout, both Feinberg and Welch quit DoorDash and began brainstorming ideas for a startup of their own. Then, one wine tasting changed their lives.

“We had just come back from an amazing wine tasting experience in Napa with a woman named Karen MacNeil,” says Feinberg. MacNeil, it turns out, wrote the best-selling wine book of all time: The Wine Bible. “She has this way of talking about wine that just makes it really fun and simple. So we started thinking about how we could take that voice and inspiration and bring it to the masses,” recalls Feinberg.

They began digging into the world of wine and discovered a glaring white space: wine is the only beverage product with a one-size-fits-all approach to the size of the bottle. “Wine is typically served by the glass — why do people think by the glass but they can't buy by the glass?” So with “blind confidence and naiveté” charging them forward, Feinberg and Welch dreamt up In Good Taste and launched it into the world.

In Good Taste got their start in hotels — the minibars, room service, and amenities of 300 hotels. “We’re not going to compete with the Constellations of the world, the multi-million dollar brands with massive sales teams that are winning in bars and restaurants. We had to think, ‘where does the mini bottle really make sense?’ and hotels were a natural fit.” But just on the precipice of a national deal with Wyndham and Kimpton Hotels, the pandemic hit.

The team quickly had to pivot to ecommerce. Wine, they discovered, can be sold direct-to-consumer in 44 states, but you have to apply to each one individually. “Each has its own challenges. It’s an enigma,” says Feinberg. At first, they were able to ship to California and 12 other states. “That quite clearly wasn't enough,” he reports. If you're doing any type of influencer campaign, for example, and somebody in Ohio sees it but can't actually buy the product, you’re essentially throwing marketing dollars out the door. Though a cumbersome process to apply to all 44 states, they eventually bit the bullet. And this led to the most powerful snowball effect of their brand.

With the ability to ship to anyone across the country, In Good Taste was in the exact right place at the right time; mid-COVID, they could host virtual Zoom tastings for companies. “Every winery in the world wanted to do virtual tastings during COVID. But when you open a big bottle, you only have 3-5 days to finish it,” says Feinberg. The typical bottle isn’t built for a tasting opportunity, but In Good Taste’s miniature bottle easily became the market leader for tastings.

“We worked with a lot of HR teams, culture teams, sales teams, and marketing teams from 50% of Glassdoor’s Best Place to Work companies. It became a snowball effect of word-of-mouth marketing, and suddenly we had about 800 corporate clients working with us,” says Feinberg. In total, they hosted around 150,000 people in their virtual tastings.”

With Zoom tastings mostly in the rearview, In Good Taste is now looking to further expand distribution. “All of our corporate clients are now coming back looking for in-person tasting opportunities,” reports Feinberg. Eager to meet the moment yet again, In Good Taste is taking this feedback as the perfect reason to launch their first tasting room near their Bay Area corporate clients in Marin County in June.

The team is also excited to be launching a subscription service, both in-club and online. “The challenge with building a subscriber base is that wine isn’t a necessity, like needing a bottle of milk every two weeks. We need to generate demand,” says Feinberg. “This means that we have to create our own consumption occasions. The model I look at all the time is 1-800-Flowers.”

As they build the tasting room and subscription service, In Good Taste will also be launching back into hotels, as well as retail in Target and Sprouts. “With the hotel business, DTC, tasting room, corporate business, and retail, it's all really coming together,” says Feinberg. Across all channels, In Good Taste will work towards their mission of making wine more accessible for all tastebuds — from tasting tenures to Two Buck Chuck loyalists.