At dinner with friends in 2006, Roy Goslin and Dianne Ferrandi mentioned that they were starting a wine import business. Their friend Chip asked what they were going to call the new company. When Roy said they hadn’t decided on a name, Chip said, “You need to call the company Z Wines.” Roy asked why and Chip said, “Well, you’ve got zee food, and we have zee wine!” And thus was born Z Wines USA.
A scant two years later, Z Wines USA is viewed as a key source in the United States for South African wine. That’s not surprising, considering that Goslin and Ferrandi grew up and lived in South Africa until moving to the United States in 1998.
The couple, married since 1997, was recruited by a large U.S-based information-technology consulting firm that offered them a choice between Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Milwaukee after Goslin turned down an offer to run the firm’s New York operation. Ferrandi’s specialty was project management, while her husband’s expertise was in strategic positioning and organizational change. Within five years, both Ferrandi and Goslin had struck out on their own as independent business consultants.
So how did they end up in the wine business? “All of our lives, we’ve both been connected to the wine industry in some way, shape, or form,” says Goslin, who spent eight years working on the production side in materials and process management for a South African wine producer that was the largest winery in the southern hemisphere. “My grandparents were caterers and hospitality managers, so food and wine was an everyday part of our lives. Dianne’s parents had vineyards; they never made wine, but they sold their grapes to local winemakers. So Dianne was in touch with vineyard management practices and the winemaking process at a very early age.”
While they were looking for a shop to buy, someone suggested to Goslin that he and Dianne put their business and industry expertise to use by importing wine from South Africa. “When we ran the numbers, the import business looked more attractive long-term than the retail business,” Goslin says.
Z Wines USA now distributes wines from South Africa, Argentina, Australia, and France as well as domestic wines from Washington, Oregon, and California. The company discovered early on that many newer importers focused on particular countries or niches. The retailers that Z Wines dealt with suggested that the company broaden its focus, as this would provide more selling opportunities as well as the potential for building a more sustainable business.
Z Wines has exclusive rights in the U. S. to all of the imported brands with the exception of the Argentinean product, and exclusive rights in Minnesota to all of the domestic brands. Its portfolio remains small, consisting of about 100 products. “We could by now have a much larger portfolio, but we accept only 1 or 2 percent of all the wines that cross our path,” Ferrandi says. “We don’t believe you can build a sustainable wine business on huge volumes of bulk wines. You have to have exceptional value in the bottle.”
With revenues conservatively estimated at $350,000, Goslin and Ferrandi hope to move operations from their Plymouth home to a corporate office within two years. “We want to build the Minnesota market, but also the national market for these brands,” Goslin says. “We are already speaking to a number of distributors outside of Minnesota about building our South African portfolio.”
Goslin and Ferrandi believe that American wine aficionados are still learning about the range and quality of South Africa’s wines. Their job, in part, is to help cultivate that knowledge. “When we put the wine in front of the end consumer,” Goslin says, “we start to get a following.”
