We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tom Rowe a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Tom, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

We got our first client completely by accident. I am a wine lover and I will talk wine with anyone. Back in 2016, I was laying on an operating table getting prepped for some radiation treatment I was about to undergo. I had nurses on each side of me while the doctor did the procedure. The nurses were talking to one another waiting for the doctor to begin and one asked the other what kind of wine she liked. The reply was “Malbec”. I turned my head to the answering nurse and said, “I love Malbec too, but have you ever had a Carmenere?” She said, “No, what’s that?” so I told her all about the story of Carmenere. They were both inquisitive after that, asking me how I knew the story and I explained our wine business was about to launch but that I had been teaching wine for a few years. One nurse said to the other, “we need to have an event with him.” I told her they had all my contact information in their computer system! Sure enough, two days later, one of the nurses called and booked our first event! It was SO much fun!!

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 background and context?

Our business got started because of our fundraising activity for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). I was looking for ways to raise money to participate in their Team In Training program, where they train you to do endurance events (half-marathons, marathons, triathlons, hundred mile bike rides and such), and in exchange, you fundraise for them. A team mate had a wine tasting event as a fundraiser and invited the team to participate. I did, and was hooked. I started having wine tastings of my own to raise funds for LLS. A couple of years later, I was coaching a running team for LLS and had a mother/daughter duo on my team. Mom was great at fundraising, daughter, not so much. Daughter comes to me to tell me she’s going to have to drop because she can’t raise the funds. I asked her if she had friends who liked wine, and she said, “of course I do!” I told her we were going to do a wine tasting and that I would attend to make sure everything went as it should. Well, the instructor that night was the owner of the company. She was a pretty smart business person, but was terrible at public speaking. She was asking questions to try to engage the crowd, but no one was biting… it was always me that answered the question! When it was over, she came to me and said “you know as much about wine as we do, you should teach for us!” I said I’d love to, and that’s how it started. A couple of years later, that business folded. I missed it so much that I talked my best friend into opening our business together. He said that he’d love to, but knew nothing about how to get started. I didn’t either but I told him I didn’t either, but we were smart enough to figure it out.

Our wine tasting fundraisers work like this: The fundraiser invites their friends, family and favorite winos to their event. They ask that in return for attending the event, that their guests make donations to the charity they are supporting. The guest determines the amount of the minimum donation and collects all of those funds… we never touch that money. Then we hold the event where we share 12 wines from all over the world. We teach them about the specific wines (what grapes, what’s on the nose, what the flavor expectation is, where it’s from, vintage, alcohol content, etc.). I’ve done a lot of research around the grapes in advance and always have stories to tell about it’s history, why it grows so well in certain areas, and I fill their heads with lots of trivia! We really just have a ton of fun learning about, and tasting, wine! Our specialty is that we focus on wines that aren’t readily available on the DFW retail market. That makes it all the more fun, but it also means that our inventory is always changing because we feature wines that are limited production or from boutique wineries. That means that when we run out of a wine, we’re just out, and we have to go find something to replace it. At the end of the evening, guests have an opportunity to purchase any of the wines they’ve tasted. The fee we charge to the fundraiser is determined by wine sales. If they meet our minimum sales threshold, there is no charge. To date, we’ve never had anyone miss it and we’ve never had to charge a fundraiser for their event!

The greatest pleasure we get from doing this is the fact that we get to meet some super nice people who are just trying to do some good in the community. Some of their stories about why they support their specific charity are emotional, some are just fun, but it all makes us feel like we’re doing the right thing!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

As much as I love this wine journey, it hasn’t always been easy. I mentioned previously that I was a fundraiser for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). At the time I hooked up with them, I had no real connection to cancer. Well, for most of us, that doesn’t usually last long and it was during my first season that lost both my mother and my oldest sister to lung cancer. Now, lung cancer isn’t a blood cancer or lymphatic cancer, but LLS invests a lot of money in research and some of the discoveries they’ve made have helped the entire cancer community. For instance, the mediport that a lot of cancer patients wear to receive their chemotherapy came from research conducted by LLS funded scientists. Now, I am a cancer patient. I had prostate cancer in 2017, then ampullary cancer later that year that resulted in major surgery followed by chemotherapy due to the discovery that I had cancer of the small intestine. We thought we had it beat, but I am now dealing with metastatic cancer of the small intestine.

The surgery for the ampullary cancer put our business on hold. My partner’s a great guy, but he has a major fear of public speaking, so he couldn’t conduct classes. Then came Covid and the State of Texas forced us to close because they classified us as a bar. We aren’t, but that’s water under the bridge now because nobody wanted to get groups of people together during Covid to take their masks off and drink wine! We took advantage of a grant offered by Denton County. It wasn’t much, but it paid the rent for a few months!

With my most recent diagnosis, I put the word out to our Facebook followers that I was looking to train people who wanted to teach wine. I got bowled over with a terrific response and so now our classes are being conducted by these great folks who were willing to step up to help us out!

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I have done a ton of networking with other business owners. We like to give each other referrals. That has worked very well for us because many of them have attended our events and absolutely love what we do. They see that we are really there to try to help people give back to the community. Our shop is in Lewisville and the small-business community is very active. We try hard to help one another. One of the networking groups I belong to, in Flower Mound, is actually a non-profit. All of the dues we pay and money from fundraisers we hold, goes out to local non-profits. It’s a win-win!

It’s true what they say about word of mouth advertising! That’s basically all we’ve done. We do have a Facebook page but are not good about promoting ourselves there. That’s my task for the coming months!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.wineswithappeal.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wineswithanappeal

Image Credits
All photos are taken by personal friends, usually with my equipment.