Beverage Retailer May/June 1998

by Elaine Abadie


or the Breitstein family, life is a Cabernet, old chum.

The Breitsteins, David, Judy and their son, Ron, own and operate one of the country's premier wine shops, but you wouldn't know it from the Duke of Bourbon's unpretentious setting in a 1950s strip shopping mall in Canoga Park, California.

Everyone from Hollywood movie stars to construction workers shops here, and that's the way the Breitsteins like it.

"The personality of our store is the key," David Breitstein says. "Lots of people sell wine; it's just that we have carved a niche by understanding the palates of our customers and what they enjoy drinking.

"Relationships are important at the Duke of Bourbon. Our store is out of the way for most people, but they go out of their way to come here. It's the feeling of being welcome. No matter who you are, everybody likes to be treated with respect. It's nice to walk into a store and be greeted by name."

And Duke of Bourbon is a name remembered by people across the nation.


THE RIGHT TRACK

The Duke of Bourbon must be on the right track: sales for the past 10 years have increased dramatically.

"The popularity of wine and the fact that we have the largest allocations of many of the wineries in California are responsible for our success," he says. "We teamed up with many of the wineries in the beginning, before this wine boom came. They're taking care of us now."

The Duke's most popular wines? "Our blue chips, our pedigree wines that are so important to us are Duckhorn, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Au Bon Climat, Long Vineyards, Schramsberg, Martini."

It all began in 1967 when David and Judy opened a 2,000-square-foot liquor store in the west Fernando Valley. Thirty-one years later, the Breitsteins are in the same shop with only an additional 1,000 square feet of floor space and an 850-square-foot temperature-controlled wine vault to store the Duke of Bourbon's large collection of rare grand format bottles.


In his book, "Wine & Dine" Ron Breitstein
recommends choosing a wine and then the food.
Because California law allows wineries to sell direct to retailers, Breitstein keeps much of his supply in wineries' temperature-controlled warehouses. "I don't have to have the square footage to keep wine here, so I keep my wine with the wineries' wine and draw on it when I need it," he says. "We have several thousand cases of wine, but we don't have to have it on our property."

The Duke of Bourbon does have space for a large G-gauge model train layout running throughout the store. "Wine and toys go together," Breitstein says. "We thought the train would relax people and make the store a fun place to shop."

The train is not the only toy in the shop. "Remember that wine is a toy for collectors," Breitstein says. "We really understand the psyche of the collector here."

"There are several different phases. I have many customers who have 500 to 1,000 cases of wine, who just love to buy and collect. They may only need a bottle of something; some customers need a case of everything."

"And the hobby isn't just drinking wine; the hobby is reading about it, searching it out, procuring it and showing it to your friends. Drinking is just one component."

"I want people to feel that collecting is fun. It shouldn't be a burden, it shouldn't be a financial stress."

The pleasant, well-organized store has wide aisles, plenty of light to showcase its inventory and beautiful signs created by the Duke's staff artist. Contemporary jazz and rock 'n' roll played low create a relaxed atmosphere.

A bimonthly newsletter, wine tastings and wine education seminars round out the wine experience at the Duke of Bourbon.

"We're considered by a lot of people as having the best wine tasting group in America when it comes to our customer base," Breitstein says. Because California law does not allow in-store tastings, the Duke hosts events at restaurants and hotels. A recent sit-down tasting for 150 people included representatives from four wineries. "We host people from around the world at wine dinners and we have sit-down wine tasting seminars with winemakers," he says. "All the major winemakers we do business with attend at least once or twice a year."

Breitstein's four full-time employees participate in these activities and provide input about the store's wine selection and displays.

"Today we're meeting to discuss our newest specialty products," he says. "We're going to feature wines from Tuscany in a section. We've discovered that we sell so much Chianti here that we're going to treat it like a varietal, just as our Cabernet section, Chardonnay section, Merlot section."

Breitstein emphasizes the pairing of food and wine. "The relationship between wine and food is not to be overlooked. They go hand in hand. It's important that they complement each other."

A gourmet food section, added eight years ago, includes pasta, sauces, cheeses, candies and nuts. The gourmet products are available in gift baskets and featured in the store's holiday brochure and its Web site http://dukeofbourbon.com. To boost food sales, Breitstein recently hired a merchandising consultant who will work two days a week.

"We're really wine guys trying to be gourmet food guys," Breitstein says. "Our consultant will cross-merchandise more of the food with the wines to see if we can pick up sales."

WINE TIME

Wine constitutes the majority of the store's business; liquor and beer represent 15 percent of the gross. "Specialty items do well," Breitstein says. "For us, high-end vodkas and Scotches and Bourbons sell."

And just what is the Duke's favorite Bourbon? "We're very fond of Maker's Mark," he says. "It tastes good, it's packaged right and it's reasonably priced."

"I would encourage anybody who wants to be in the wine business to study about what they're buying, to read books, to taste wines and to treat wine as a very special product. Someone has worked very hard to produce it. The finest wines in the world are made by artisans who work very hard not only with their hands, but their heads to create something that tastes good. This is not easy. It's not easy to make fine wine and to deliver it all over the world."

It's not easy to sell fine wine either, but the Breitstein family has used its hands and heads to create a fine wine shop.

"One of my philosophies is that the personality of the winemaker is in the taste of the wine," Breitstein says. "I guarantee that if you taste a great wine, you're going to like the person who made it."

And at the Duke of Bourbon, you're going to like the people who sell it, too.
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