We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Robert and Laura Schermeister a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Robert and Laura, appreciate you joining us today. Risk-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.
“Feel the fear and do it anyway”. That’s the motto we live by because we’ve been taking risks – separately before we met and now together as a small business couple – since our early twenties. Back then, in 2001, we were fresh out of college and flung into the world to go and find success. Yet what we’ve learned now, twenty years later, is that success has many faces and no two triumphs are alike. From our experience, our wins have had one common variable: they all began with taking a considerable risk. What’s more is that these pivotal moments in our lives have opened us up to connecting with people, living a life of adventure, and implementing gratitude into daily life because we can see first-hand how our risk-taking has absolutely paid off.
Rob, the winemaker and founder of Schermeister Winery, has always been a risk taker with his body while being incredibly protective of his money. A scientist and logical thinker at heart, he has always seen money as a tool for strategy and guarded it tightly while opting for adrenaline-driven risks. At four years old, his father taught him to ski and Rob quickly graduated to the double black diamond slopes of Jackson Hole, flinging himself from cornices while nimbly flirting with gravity on the long run down. In 2008, he bungee-jumped from a bridge in Nepal which was the third highest in the world at the time. These big risks of the physical kind gave Rob a rush that money could never buy.
Laura, Rob’s wife and Creative Director for the winery, first met Rob when he hired her to design the winery’s website in 2014. The two could not have been more different than one another; Laura was extroverted, bubbly, and outspoken while Rob was a quiet, bookish introvert. Laura saw money as the gateway to living life to its fullest in the form of experiences like travel, fine dining, and property investment. One thing we DID have in common was a shared belief about creating something great out of nothing. We valued well-made things, whether that be a meticulously crafted bottle of wine or a beautifully illustrated label design.
Our love for one another grew fast after the website was done, and our contrasting views on risk-taking ended up being the foundation for a wonderful life together. Rob encouraged Laura to get out of her comfort zone by exploring the outdoors: he showed her how wondrous the world could be from the trail with nothing more than a backpack and a tent. He assured her that her dream of solo-cycling the Ice Fields Parkway in Canada was 100% within her realm of abilities and drove her to each checkpoint every day so she could accomplish her goal. Laura, in turn, encouraged Rob to fully realize his dream of growing our small winery by opening a tasting room in Sonoma Valley years ahead of his original timeline. That risk required spending almost every penny he had saved because we couldn’t imagine doing anything else. She pushed him to continue going “all in” because she believed so passionately that his wine and story needed to be shared with the world. We both agreed that if we kept our full-time jobs and just made a little wine on the side, we’d always wonder what could have happened if we’d spent it all to grow the dream. That’s when you have to acknowledge your fear and just… jump.
Robert, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
We are Rob and Laura Schermeister, owners and operators of Schermeister Winery. A boutique winery in Sonoma Valley, California, we produce 1,000 cases of low-intervention wines per year. All of our varietals are native fermented, unfiltered, unfined, and sustainably farmed. Because our wines are unfiltered, they’re also vegan-friendly as wine filters and fining agents typically have animal byproducts.
We do more than just make wine, though. While our goal is to showcase the absolute best wine that a vineyard and its microclimate can produce, our mission is to connect with humans using wine as the centerpiece. By prioritizing wine quality over everything else, we can shift others’ perspectives on this art form by educating and exposing wine enthusiasts to a meaningful sensory experience. This typically happens in our rustic-modern tasting room in Glen Ellen, which is ten minutes north of downtown Sonoma. Designed by Laura, who champions all creative aspects of the winery, the space is a nod to natural materials like knotty alder and wool with Scandinavian-inspired furnishings. It’s a place where you can settle in, talk, and laugh!
When guests and members visit us, they are welcomed into a warm and inviting space where Rob hosts everyone for tastings. The vibe is comfortable and casual, which we believe is the perfect energy for deep conversations about our wines and everything else. Each wine we share from our tasting menu lends an opportunity to learn about varietals, how we both decided to bring that wine into our portfolio, and how we live our lives outside of the winery as well. It opens up the conversation to travel, schooling, our childhoods, and more! When people come to meet us and try our wines, they leave feeling energized about their experience and often say it’s the best tasting they’ve ever had. We are also quick to remind them that a great wine experience is reciprocal because the tasting is as much about the energy they bring to the table as well. By acknowledging this harmony, we are creating something for people that is honestly very hard to find in wine country.
Our tasting room is 100% a hidden gem, which we love, because people really have to work to find us. Wine enthusiasts of all knowledge levels seek us out because they want to have an authentic wine experience versus a drinking experience. When our guests are totally into what we’re doing, it motivates us to continue making wine, even though we are constantly faced with challenges like increased tourism costs, natural disasters, and economic downturns. By staying small, we can shift our production up or down based on any given year, which has been crucial to our success as a small winery. Last but not least, we have THE BEST members! Those who are truly invested in us love what we do because we do it with honesty (for instance, we are very candid in sharing that not every year is a great year; honesty leads to trust and trust creates believers). Our members so passionately believe in how we live and what we create that they are excited to enjoy every bottle of wine that Rob creates. You can smell and taste our excitement for this craft. Our members not only know our wines, but they know us because we are the face of the winery when they come in to discover something wonderful.
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
There’s a joke in the wine industry that goes, “The best way to make a small fortune in the wine industry is to start with a large one” and truer words have never been spoken! Rob started the winery two years before meeting Laura and did it in a very unconventional way. While working full time at a winery that also produced wines for smaller winemakers, he had access to the facility at a lower rate being an employee there. So in 2012, which was a stellar year for Pinot Noir, he scraped together a couple thousand dollars and bought enough fruit to make only 100 cases of wine. Having received many high end wines traded with industry friends, Rob auctioned his best bottles online and that money went to buy barrels.
He speaks fondly of those days when he’d come home with a $5 pizza from Little Caesars, which he enjoyed with fine wines from Napa Valley and beyond. Those were the good ol’ days! While his friends at the winery spent $12 every day on fancy deli sandwiches, Rob brought ramen noodles from home. Every single penny mattered because his dream was bigger than his tastebuds when it came to food costs.
When Rob and Laura later moved in together, all meals were cooked at home to save money for a tasting room, but we did enjoy one date night per month at Round Table Pizza, where we got the $18 special and shared one pint of beer. In a place like Napa where rents were insane, we moved to the remote Mount Veeder area and lived in a 400 square-foot cabin, splitting the $985/per month rent which was a steal in 2016.
There were a few investors who, after tasting our wines, wanted to put forth big money to help us grow. We politely declined because we preferred the idea of being our own bosses and didn’t want to feel beholden to anyone. Choices like those were tough at every turn but we inevitably listened to our guts which were yelling, “you got this on your own!” We’d rather suffer a little in the beginning by living extremely frugally so we could grow slowly and steadily. Growing by 100 cases per year, we’ve been able to assess the market and even sell out of our wines a few times, which was exciting! Now, we are holding steady at 1,000 cases per year which keeps our doors open to new people and opens up space for members, too. We’ve hit our groove and the lifestyle sacrifices early on were 100% worth it. You have to want something bigger so badly that it becomes infinitely more important than the instant gratification of fancy cocktails or a new car. You have to have a conversation with “future you” which, to us, is a crucial part of owning a business no matter how long you’ve been around. And even when you’ve made it past that 2-3 year hump that brings many businesses down, you have to save even more for rainy days and unexpected costs. The freedom of owning our small winery is a luxury but we will never be over-confident, even on our highest-grossing days for wine sales. The love always comes before the money.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
How much time do you have? From the time we decided to quit our jobs and run the winery full-time, resilience has been a major theme in our relationship as a couple and as business partners. In July of 2017 we were married and were also slated to open our tasting room, which was under construction, that same month. Just three months later in October, our little cabin on Mount Veeder burned down and we lost almost everything, save for our cat, wedding clothes, computers, and KitchenAid mixer that Laura threw into the pickup when we were evacuating.
A map of the burn area showed that our house, our tasting room, and all of our wine storage – Rob’s entire life’s work – were all assumed to be gone. We talked about moving the winery up to Oregon because we couldn’t afford to start over in California but didn’t know anyone there. Thankfully, the fire spared our tasting room and just barely missed our wine supply. We could do two things from here: drown in our own victim narrative or find every silver lining we could.
We chose the latter, banded together, and tag-teamed a comeback from disaster. Rob, being a spreadsheet mastermind, prepared all of the paperwork to get grants and insurance payback. Laura took to the community with an Amazon wishlist for tableware and underwear. We changed the conversations from “our house and all our stuff is gone” to “at least we didn’t have to load a moving truck” and “we won’t have to worry about being eaten by mountain lions anymore”. It was all about embracing what we had because we were all alive and we could still make and sell wine. We were now renting a house that was twice the size of the cabin and allowed dogs, which brought our amazing rescue wine dog Eli into our lives! By becoming resilient, we became stronger and happier in every aspect of our lives beyond the fire.
Past the fire trauma, but we were also handling massive delays in opening our tasting room. Our contractors did quality work but overcommitted to multiple clients, turning a 3-month timeline into an 18-month timeline. We missed two harvest seasons being open which was a huge financial hit because October brings in the most tourism for wine. Finally, by late December 2018, we opened our doors to anyone who would brave the exceptionally rainy winter that year. Every time we came to the tasting room, another artisan business at Jack London Village had closed or moved. We sat together and cried, wondering if we had spent all of our savings for nothing. But we kept showing up. We put the key in the door, turned on the lights, and blasted LCD Soundsystem to bring in positive energy. We went to therapy. We BELIEVED. And finally, on a sunny day in June of 2019, our tasting room was packed to the brim and the end-of-day report told us we were awesome. Just in time for a global pandemic!
Here we are, over 5 years later, having made it through every single obstacle the world could throw at us as a small business. Our marriage is intact, Covid is still here but no longer a threat, and now small wineries are in trouble. Wine consumption is changing with every new generation of 21+ year-olds and we know now that younger drinkers want more than a buzz. We know that you want an experience with real products made – by hand – by real people. We are those people and are proud to be in the minority of wineries offering so much more than a glass of wine, but an opportunity to be a part of something good that still exists in the world. Even in this time of change, we will be here with the lights on, ready to share our love of wine and our stories around making it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://schermeister.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/schermeisterwinery
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/schermeisterwinery
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/schermeister-winery-glen-ellen
Image Credits
Laura Schermeister