Peter Andrews

So there's a lot of opportunity there, but I've really just let all the work I'm doing wholesale kind of feed into the DTC side.

So definitely a huge headwind.

2025, it was 30%.

So it was the highest of all major wine producing nations.

It's now reduced to 10%.

But now we have the fun of a weakening dollar and rising fuel costs.

So that's basically brought us back to square one.

And I think that the real challenge with South African wine within that is there's not as much price elasticity.

In regions like Burgundy or Champagne, there's kind of clout to it where you can say, hey, I have to go up in price 10%, 15%, 20%.

You just don't have that type of ability yet with South Africa.

So margin pressure is definitely a real concern.

No, it's like you're speaking my language.

My goal, I think one of the biggest shortcomings with even the premium South African wines that have been here is they're very small producers.

And they're put into far too many states.

There's not enough wine to satisfy those states.

And then consumers don't know who they are.

And so my goal is to be in a small set of states with distribution partners that are cities like Charleston, Nashville, Chicago.

I want to be able to go to those markets and train the distributors, train the sales teams and the sommeliers and wine buyers.

So to your point, I just kicked off with my distributor in Tennessee two weeks ago, and we sold 100 cases of wine in three days.

So there's so much potential in markets like that where it's just – I think people don't think of it first like they would say New York, but you go there and there's incredible food scenes.