After 20 Years, A Wine Events Business Owner Has To Almost Start Over

Eric V. Orange was hanging commercial sheetrock in Wichita Kansas, when a friend enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY offered him a place to stay and look for work. The work Orange found was at Millbrook Vineyards, a Hudson Valley winery, which had been started by John S. Dyson, who as Commissioner of Agriculture and Markets was instrumental in the New York Farm Winery Act of 1976.

Orange spent six years at Millbrook, growing grapes and helping to make wine. He says: “I always thought it was ironic that I moved from Kansas to New York and became a farmer.”

Alas, it occurred to Orange that farming was not his calling.

The Village of Millbrook hosted The Wine Society of America (WSA), a wine club with national ambitions. WSA’s board included wine industry giants Alexis Lechine, Steven Spurrier, Oz Clarke and Peter Sichel. Orange took a job there, but the inability to ship wine across the country had put WSA out of business within a year. 

Says Orange, “I moved on, first to Seattle…hoping to work at Chateau St. Michelle, but it was bad timing and I moved back to Wichita.”S

He enrolled in college and supported himself as Wine Steward/Bar Manager at a private club, followed by the job of Wine Rep for a small local distributer. Finally, Orange worked for Paterno Imports (now Terlato Wines International) as District Manager for, as he puts it, “Denver and the Mountains”. 

Some of his Paterno portfolio included: Rutherford Hill, Cuvaison, Markham Vineyards, Freemark Abbey, as well as Frescobaldi, Masi, Il Poggione, Pio Cesare, Chapoutier, Ruinart.

It was 1998, Orange recalls that to get the word out about Paterno products there was “…Radio, Newspapers and posters.” He also says that same year, “…the internet went mainstream…it had been around for several years, but now there was the Netscape browser…there was AOL.”

After 15 years of wine sales experience, Orange quit his job in 1999, and for $300 took CompUSA computer/internet courses: the Internet as a Business, How to Code HTML, how to use spreadsheets and how to build web sites.

While studying, Orange met with a big Denver Retailer who got around interstate wine shipping restrictions by owning stores in five states. He hired Orange to create a website with a shopping-cart program. The site included a ‘Wine Events’ page. At the time, Orange was on the board of American Institute of Wine and Food as well as The International Sommelier Guild, where he had taken the first phase of the Court of Master Sommeliers. Through institutions and wholesaler contacts he was, “…able to put up a busy calendar of Denver Wine and Food Events and I started emailing people.”

As the orders came in, he proposed to the retailer, “…a robust, expandable system with real-time inventory reconciliation with a price of between $15-25k.”

When the retailer opted for a $400 package instead, Orange moved on.

He soon was involved with a Silicon Valley startup with $35 million in capital he says, “…from Jeff Bezos/Amazon and Michael Mondavi…they got fancy San Francisco offices and hired a field of guys and girls like me in major markets around the country…we all tried to figure out how to thwart the Three Tier System. They may have lasted 2 years.”

Meanwhile, through a Yahoo forum, Orange connected with a programmer in Slovenia, “…for $1500 I seriously tried to work the idea of www.LocalWineEvents.com (LWE)…We went live in July of 2000.”

2000 was also the year of the ‘dot-com’ bust. Wineries did not advertise on LWE, and Orange discovered how hard it was to sell and place ads—until Google Adsense arrived in 2003. He says, “With just a few snippets of code, Google fed ads to my site that were not only appropriate for the content, but often location specific based on which ‘Local’ page someone was looking at…My first dedicated server cost $300 per month, paid for by Google. At its peak, I think it was near $300 a day.”

Soon the pennies Google Ads paid were no longer worth cluttering up the LWE site. Says Orange, “I started posting events that I found, usually wine shops or restaurants. Then I would look for contacts in that town who were competitors to the folks whose events I had posted. I would tell them about my site. Often when they looked and saw their competition posting, they posted too and it snowballed. I collected a database of email addresses for folks in the business…I had credentials in the wine/food business, which I think mattered at the time. About 6 months after I launched, US News and World Report wrote about us and that spiked things up considerably.”

People could post for free, but for a fee they could add pictures and get enhanced exposure. For its own exposure, LWE ran dedicated targeted emails, and became an online calendar of Food and Drink related events worldwide, by city. People could also subscribe to ‘The Juice,’ an e-newsletter, and each week subscribers had a 30-day calendar of events coming up in their area. Event posters without online credit card capability could sell tickets to their event through the LWE ticket sales system.

By 2020, LWE had grown to over $1 million in annual revenue; then, March 2020 and the pandemic arrived. As Orange put it, LWE revenue “…fell off a cliff.”

He says, “Before Covid, there were a growing segment of online wine ‘Events’ like Twitter Taste Offs, etc, but it was a very small segment, and we [LWE] were all about Location.”

LWE did not have an effective way to take or display non-location specific events, but, says Orange, “There is a huge surge of them right now and we want to present them, both online and in ‘The Juice”…I do see a long term effect making Virtual Tastings and Online Food/Wine Education a thing.”

He is fast at work revising the LWE site to accommodate Virtual Tastings and Online Wine Education—it’s expected to be up and running in a few weeks. 

Orange predicts, “Eventually, we will all be exposed to Covid-19 and/or there will be a vaccine. Things will return and we will have events again. LWE will have better options for finding and participating in online offerings, perhaps even organizing our own.”