We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Robert Nida. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Robert below.
Alright, Robert thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.
The biggest risk my wife and I ever took was to go into business for ourselves. We had been working in the wine industry for years, and through the ups and downs of being in an emerging wine region, we decided to start our consulting business. As the consulting business was getting off the ground, we continued to work in tasting rooms to pay our bills and keep food on the table. After about two years, we had built up the business enough that it could support us financially. Owning one business wasn’t enough, and we took our most significant risk in 2018 when we decided it was time to get our wine label off the ground. Having your own label/winery is an expensive adventure. You are pouring money into the business for a few years before your first vintage is ready for sale. You’re making decisions on wine styles and varieties to use with no tasting room data backing up those decisions. You’re just hoping you’re making the right decision. Then you get your tasting room open, and you hope the experience you are trying to give translates to your guests. But those tastings you connect with the guests make it all worth it.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I got into the industry by dumb luck. I was studying horticulture at Texas A&M and was going into my senior year, not knowing what I wanted to do with my career. Like many college kids that don’t know what they want to do, I decided to prolong the start of real life by going to graduate school. I met with the professor in charge of the horticulture graduate program, and he told me that I need to find professors researching things I’m interested in and apply to those schools. That didn’t help because I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the horticulture field. During this time, wine slowly started to creep into my life. I had just finished a semester abroad in Chile, took a wine tasting class that A&M offers, and applied for an internship at a winery in the Texas Hill Country during Christmas break. I got the internship and just fell in love with the industry. After the internship, I’d come out to work on the weekends until I graduated. I also started looking into graduate programs in enology and found the Euromaster Vinifera program. I applied, got accepted, and have been on a whirlwind adventure ever sense.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
We make all of our wine, and I had been working in the industry for about seven years before we started making wine for our own label. Because we are self-funding this business, I used some of my connections within the industry to help get us started. For our first main vintage in 2018, I used my connections at one of the first wineries I worked at to make our wine there. I’d work around their schedule and come in and use equipment when they weren’t. In 2019 one of my wife’s clients from our consulting business brought me on as their consulting winemaker. I worked a deal with them where I would lower my consulting fee if I could do all of my fermentation work through their facility.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
How we have designed our experience has been one of the most significant factors in creating brand loyalty. Our goal was to create a tasting that anyone could come in and enjoy, no matter their wine knowledge. This starts by having our tastings by appointment. The reason behind this is to help with traffic control. No one likes going to a place that is overly crowded, and you feel like another number. We also want our guest’s time to be rewarded. They took time out of their day to see us, which should be rewarded. Our tasting by appointment allows us to give our guests our full attention for that hour. We also have an interactive education portion in all our tastings. We have a topic that we focus on for a quarter, and each month in the quarter, we change the theme of the topic. The goal of this is to take away some of the mystique and snobbiness that can be associated with wine.
Contact Info:
- Website: pebblerockcellars.wine
- Instagram: @pebblerockcellars
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PebbleRockCellars