We recently connected with Shawn Eubank and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Shawn, thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a bit about who your hero is and the influence they’ve had on you?
Farming is hard work. Our heroes are the winegrowers we have the pleasure to represent, to tell their stories, and share in their victories and hardships. Mostly spread across Spain, France, and Italy, these farmers each have a unique story typically tied to a small parcel of land where they invest long, backbreaking days in hopes of producing a grape crop that can somehow, almost magically, capture these special places into a single bottle wine.
Ignasi lives in Catalunya, steeped in over 600 years of family tradition on a large swath of poor limestone soils in the Alt Penedès valley. The 23rd generation in his family to call this place home, it wasn’t until the age of 35 that Ignasi decided to return to the farm and take over the family business. Launching in 2012 under the name Vinyes Singulars, Ignasi, wife Ana, and soon to be born daughter Mar, immediately began the process to convert the estate to organic agriculture. While now more widely accepted, in 2012 Ignasi was one of the handful of pioneers in his area to shun the longstanding “tradition” of conventional viticulture and convert to more natural methods, focused on building soil health, fostering biodiversity, and avoiding chemical inputs.. While the estate had been actively growing grapes for hundreds of years, in recent decades the fruit was largely sold off to local winemakers, which meant the family winery had become unused and obsolete. While working the first two vintages in a friends cellar, Ignasi constructed a small winery connected to their farmhouse surrounded by old Xarel.lo and Macabeo vines.
At this time, the idea of “natural wine” on the world stage was just beginning to blossom. For Ignasi, working in organic farming seemed like the obvious choice so it was only natural for him to carry that same philosophy into the winemaking. In the first few years, he produced a few wines, mostly wines made with the indigenous Xarel.lo grape. Selling natural wine, that is, wine farmed in organic agriculture and made without any additions, was near impossible in his local market, so Ignasi began to do a bit of traveling in the winter months to get his wines into export markets like Japan, Denmark, and the United States.
I met Ignasi in 2016 at a wine fair in New York. We immediately hit it off. I think we shared a general curiosity about life, an interest in growing things, and a common desire to grow our small businesses. We begin distributing Ignasi’s wines that year, and then transitioned into a national import role with Vinyes Singulars in 2019. Now, we generally get to see each other twice a year. Our kids play together. I take him to his first American baseball game, while he throws me into the base of an authentic Catalan human tower. We give each other business advice. We grieve together over hardships, most recently a catastrophic hail storm at Vinyes Singulars in the middle of 2022 harvest resulting in 70% loses.
It couldn’t be more special, more of a privilege, to represent people like Ignasi. We’re trusted with these magical bottles of wine which each tell a story of a family, a place, and an untold amount of hard work, hopes, and dreams. They are our heroes.
Shawn, 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?
I remember my parents drinking wine when I was a kid growing up in Virginia Beach. I don’t believe there was much discretion given to the wine purchase, but a bottle seemed to make its way to the dinner table each night across from where my older brother Josh, and I, would sit in the dining room. Gathering together for dinner, almost religiously night in and night out as a kid, didn’t seem particularly special, just something we would do.
Now I reside in Richmond, Virginia with my wife Melissa and three young children, James, Peter, and Mina. In 2010, I co-founded Rocklands Farm Winery in Poolesville, Maryland. Rocklands is a direct-to-consumer farm and winery producing low-intervention wine and pasture-raised meat on a beautiful 34 acre historic property.
In the process of beginning our vineyard at Rocklands, my older brother who was based in California at the time had started to turn me on to natural wines coming out of France through his newly founded import company Percy Selections. These wines really got me excited and opened me more to the vast world of wine, but they also weren’t available in my area to purchase. I thought there would be an opportunity to begin distributing a handful of these producers to restaurants and small shops in Richmond, so in 2014, I started Native Selections with a pallet of wine working out of a temperature-controlled former banana ripening room on the southside of Richmond. I figured the worst case scenario was being $7,000 in the red on some of my favorite wines and would just have a lot of wine to drink for years to come.
Being new to Richmond at the time, I didn’t have any existing relationships in the industry so needless to say, things started out slow. To support our family during those beginning stages, I took on quite a few part-time jobs: Uber driver, milk delivery for a local dairy, managing the wine club at Rocklands, and renting out our 2nd bedroom on Airbnb. (Just recently, a good friend told me “Shawn, in those early days, we were pretty worried about you.”) Little by little, we made friends with other wine reps and wine buyers. Thanks to an existing importer in Virginia, Williams Corner Wine, we weren’t alone getting the word out on low-intervention, natural wine. Delivering out of the trunk of my 1997 Toyota Camry, I managed to sell $30,000 in sales our first year! While not enough to consider it a “real job,” I knew we had built a foundation and was inspired to expand into other locales like Charlottesville, Tidewater, and Washington DC. The next year, we hired our first sales staff and a delivery driver. We began working with a few other importers, mainly Zev Rovine Selections, and also took our first trip to France in search of producers seeking export to the USA.
Fast forward to 2023, and we are still a small, but growing business with 5 staff, a portfolio of over 500 wines, 200+ restaurant/retail customers, weekly deliveries throughout Virginia and DC, and even distribution partners in New York, Texas, and California. Native Selections continues to exclusively work with organic and natural wines mostly from small growers in France, Spain, and Italy. Most importantly, we’re privileged to share the stories of the amazing people behind each bottle of wine.
Working in wine has made the world feel a bit smaller each year. Whether you’re a consumer, a maker, or a vendor, I think ultimately wine creates a common language and desire. It brings people together over a meaI or a glass, gathering at a table. There was a reason our parents made us sit together at that dinner table every night and now I believe special things can happen when people gather together at a table. .
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
Please see previous blurb.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
We’re in the business of selling wine. That’s what keeps the lights on. I think when it comes down to it though, it’s more about the people than the wine. I’d say 80% of sales is the people, and maybe 20% is the wine itself (recognizable brand, trendy label, delicious wine, etc). Believing that, it’s paramount that we keep our staff morale high. The three areas that come to mind when it comes to managing a team and maintaining high satisfaction are: support, empowerment, and inspiration.
Our team is small, so syncing up on a weekly basis is quite doable. I see my role as an owner/administrator in the business largely as a support role. Equipping our team with need-to-know info, celebrating accomplishments, discussing strategy, and lending an ear to the emotions of business to business sales all fall under the support umbrella. There’s no substitute for having your team know that you have their back!
I think people that are drawn to working in a small business also desire empowerment. I largely work with folks who are independent, original thinkers. As a business owner, I love that energy, that desire to be your own boss. Encouraging that same mentality amongst are staff is just as important.
Another word for inspiration might be magic. Where can our staff experience magic? More often than not, that’s overseas visits with our heroes, the winegrowers. At the moment, we take at least one team wine trip each year walk the vineyards, share meals, and hear the stories from our far away friends. While visiting our partners is an essential part of the business, including our staff also leads to higher team satisfaction and inspiration.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nativeselectionswine.com
- Instagram: @nativeselections