Our Story

A lot of people in my industry come off as pretentious and look down on regular people who are interested in wine. But wine shouldn’t be like that. I’m not like that. You can enjoy wine and not be rude about it. My whole approach for the last 20 years is to figure out what kind of wine Florence likes and build on that — to have a fun, laid-back approach. I mean, we are a wine bar first.

Once you have the right wine with the right food, it’s a game-changer. So, we added a bigger food menu about a year ago. Here’s a tomato, here’s a Sauvignon Blanc. You’ve got acid and acid — boom! They mesh. Once you get those pairings right, the world opens up.

In a short three years, we’ve outgrown this place. Pizzas have caught on. We’d like more room, so we started just looking around for a new space. I talked to Hannah Davis, the Main Street Program Manager, and she said her office could help. Then I said, “I just don’t have the money to pick up and move.” It takes a lot of cash to run a business, and it takes even more money to move and run a bigger business.

So, she told me that Downtown Florence was in the early stages of piloting a crowdfunding platform in partnership with Main Street America to assist businesses like mine called NuMarket. Basically how it worked was, whatever contribution you made, you’d get 120% back in store credits. So if you give $100 to support a business, you’ll get back $120 to use at that business distributed back as credits over six months. It’s great because a business can get the capital it needs upfront, and the supporter can get more money to spend at that local business.