OC Vodka. Can OC Wine Be Far Behind?
If you’ve been down to Ocean City recently, you may have seen “OC Vodka” stocked on the shelves of liquor stores. The OC branded Vodka is selling for $19.99 and is flying off the shelves, so says a report on DelmarvaNow.com.
“We can’t keep it in stock,” said Denver Gerhart, manager of Liquid Assets Wine and Martini Bar on 94th Street. “We do an incredible amount of business with it.
It doesn’t take a huge leap to go from sticking the ubiquitous oval logo on a Vodka bottle to sticking it on Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. This practice of making a one-off wine brand is all over California, but it is easier to do there because of the huge amount of wine that state produces. After harvest, trucks of grapes cruise up and down 101 looking for buyers to make some boutique wine and sell it for $15. Guys like Cameron Hughes have built a nice business off that sort of thing on a global scale.
In Maryland, though, there isn’t enough grapes to cover the winemaker demand. OC Wine would likely come from Virginia or Pennsylvania somewhere. Then you’d have to contend for shelf space with Sutter Home and Barefoot unless you could somehow convince retailers that OC Wine would sell above $10. Maybe an OC Blush would work better.
Link to Delmarva Now article
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:26 am
[...] Original post by Gary [...]