We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Andrew Rosado. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Andrew below.

Andrew, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, what do you think about family businesses? Would you want your children or other family members to one day join your business?

Local, family businesses are the heart beat of our communities. They are what define our local culture – from flavors to favorite traditions. Family-owned businesses are usually not in it to get rich. Instead, they are looking to make their local communities a better place to live, which is what ultimately what drove us to take the plunge four years ago.

Starting a small business can be very intimidating. However, it became less scary when we looked at it as a family adventure. I found that this venture became the creative expression I didn’t know I needed to bring joy to mine and my family’s lives.

While crafting our hand-made, small batched wines came naturally to me, everything else about running a business most certainly did not come naturally. My wife, Bonnie, and I struggled with learning how to run everything from sales, to marketing, bookkeeping, and permits/licenses. Additionally, a small business owner never seems to stop working, so we relied on a lot of family and friends who supported us to take care of kids or work shifts with us.

Our oldest daughter is eight, and she started helping us at events take sales. She knows how to run our point of sale equipment how to take cash or credit from customers when making a sale. She is also learning how to talk to customers and what it takes to create revenue. Whether she becomes an entrepreneur or not, we love that she is learning these skills early because there is so much carry over no matter what she decides to do in the future.

Overall, the empowerment you attain from running your own business is unmatched. I am the creator of my own success and failure, which affords me a level of agency and freedom to create the future I want with my family.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

After I separated from the Army in 2013, I spent seven years moving from soul-sucking day job to the next. I didn’t find a place to thrive and was struggling with finding purpose and joy.

During this time, I was making wine at home as a hobby buying homebrewing supplies from my wife’s cousin, Angela, and her husband, John, in Washington, Pennsylvania. Angela and John expanded their small wine supply store to three more businesses in three years – a winery, brewery, and brewpub. They later expanded to distilling as well. My sister-in-law also opened her own microwinery in Virginia Beach after witnessing Angela and John’s success.

I was at a cross roads in my life and career. I had the know-how to make wine from homebrewing and tremendous family support to start my own wine venture; I just needed to take the leap.

Following Bonnie’s encouragement, we opened our doors to Woodlawn Press Winery in July 2019, offering a variety of hand crafted wines to the Northern Virginia area. We refer to ourselves as an urban microwinery because we operate in a suburban area next to the city (located within a strip mall) and make significantly small batches of wine in comparison to conventional wineries. The urban winery concept removes the significant upfront costs of traditional wineries by acquiring already crushed fruit from selected distributors to produce fine, craft wine. An urban microwinery can be located in the heart of an urban area, providing a convenient way for customers to purchase and enjoy great wine without having to travel to the countryside.

We are excited to bring a unique wine experience to the Northern Virginia area. Although the wine menu includes wine flavors people are familiar with, my best wines are atypical. One of our best selling red wines is a Bourbon Barrel Aged Malbec. In fact, of the six barrels we have, five of them are bourbon barrels from a local distilling company called KO Distilling. Bourbon barrel aging wines has become a favorite technique of mine to impart unique flavors.

More recently, my meads have been extremely popular, to include PB&J Mead, Gingerbread Sugar Plum Mead for the Holidays, and this year I released a Tiramisu Mead for the first time. It’s been really fun to play with more flavors and change the conversation around what wine should taste like.

Bonnie’s family has a family lineage making wine, and we take pride on making wine using similar methods to how Bonnie’s family made wine as far back as 100 years ago. Bonnie’s great grandmother, Grazia, was arrested in 1936 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for selling wine illegally, meaning without a license. Grazia was an Italian immigrant who didn’t speak English and became widowed with three children in her late thirties. She likely sold wine as a means to make ends meat, and thankfully the judge released Grazia on probation despite a guilty plea. For this reason, we like to say we have bootleg beginnings because of her story.

Virginia Senator Scott Surovell endorsed Woodlawn Press Winery as an “innovative business” that “allows us to have a winery along Route 1” and created legislation (Senate Bill 441) to change winery licensing laws in favor of urban wineries like Woodlawn Press Winery. This legislation allows urban microwineries that do not source all of their fruit from Virginia, similar to other craft beverage manufacturers like breweries, to create and expand their tasting rooms to be a more effective source of revenue.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

A month before we planned on opening, we received a cease and desist letter from a neighboring small business who claimed we were infringing on their Trademarked name. We had planned on calling our winery “Dominion Press Winery” and this name was very close to a local wine and beer shop that also had the title “Dominion” in their name.

We had to hire an attorney that specialized in intellectual property matters to understand what our options were. Changing the name of our winery impacted a number of licenses that took months to get approved. We ultimately agreed to create a “doing business as (DBA)” name under the Dominion Press Winery name that held all of our licenses and permits. The DBA would be the public facing name so we would not have re-do paperwork already completed and our opening date would not be delayed. Although we lost the original name we loved, we gained a name that connected us more to the local community.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Success doesn’t happen overnight.

Seven months after opening, COVID 19 was a real thing we had to deal with as a community, and we had to close our tasting room. This was the first reminder that change is constant and we need to flexible and agile enough to adapt in order to not only survive but thrive. At this time, we did not have any ability to deliver, but we built one overnight. Since then we’ve continued to iterate based on how our customer preferences are changing. As an example, we’ve pivoted away from typical paint and sip type events in the tasting room and are now hosting candle making events, self defense classes, and yoga/sound bath healing events.

These type of changes are making us better incrementally, and we’ve been humbly reminded that big success is a bunch of little successes put together.

Contact Info:

• Website: wpwinery.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/wpwinery
• Facebook: facebook.com/wpwinery

Image Credits
@FunFoodGroup (for all photos except the white wine with pizza), @darkerberry (for the photo with the woman pouring at the table). @viajennn (for the photo with the white wine and pizza).