Click here for Part I

Artisanal, sustainable wines that embody passion from hand to bottle to glass

Carlee Pipitone is the founder and managing partner of Tenth Harvest. Based in Baltimore, Tenth Harvest is an importer and distributor that represents food and beverage producers from around the world. The company takes a sustainable, artisan-focused approach to its business, emphasizing personal relationships and high-quality products that embody the character of the land in which they were grown. Carlee founded Tenth Harvest after graduating from Dickinson College in 2013. In addition to English, she is fluent in Italian and Spanish.

EDWIN WARFIELD: How did you come up with the name?

CARLEE PIPITONE: The name Tenth Harvest is a story that several different winemakers have told to us in different ways over the years. The wine business is a long-term business: when you buy a vineyard or you inherit a vineyard from your family of winemakers, it takes years and years to have a crop that will produce a quality wine and a marketable wine. It takes years for the winemaker to understand their soil, their climate, and their place—what they’re dealing with. They say that after about nine or ten years, they have that figured out and it all starts to make sense around their tenth harvest. Several of my producers right now are in or around their tenth harvest and they have all said the same thing.

Q. What is your unique vision as a distributor?

At Tenth Harvest, we want to be a direct connection to the people that produce the wines and the people who consume the wines. So we work with estate producers, which mean they are farmers, they are growing the grapes, they own the land. We buy directly from them. We buy from small farmers, and we sell directly to restaurants and retail stores right now in Maryland and DC. By that, we direct import and we-self distribute.

That’s not always the norm in the industry. You can have someone who grows the grapes sells them to a winemaker. You can buy grapes, you can buy juice; you can have an export broker, an import broker, a customs broker, a distributor; you can have so many different parties that can touch the wine before it gets to the end destination. For us, we want to have a personal relationship on both sides. These are small wineries—it’s important to have those relationships. And it’s a cost savings, it’s a better margins for us, better value for our customers. It only passes through our hands.

We are a distributor and we are an importer and we just are trying to do it differently than the way it’s always been done. The alcohol industry has not changed all that much since Prohibition—a lot of the laws are the same. It’s just an industry that does not change very much and we think that it’s better to work directly and work small by focusing on quality, by focusing on small producers. We are trying to make it easier for our customers and for consumers to access quality wine and to hear the story behind it. We have an online ordering system; we were the first distributor in Maryland to offer online ordering. Now, there are several other distributors that do that now. It’s just a system that hadn’t changed in decades.

We just care. We really care about the producers. We travel. I’ve met every single one of the people that I represent and we tell their story and I sell it to people who care about it. We don’t just sell to every Costco and big-box store; we sell to people who are going to care about a quality product. It is very much like farm-to-table: these are small producers if you care about where it comes from.

We provide education and service to our customers. We will provide tasting notes and staff training on the line, since many of these products are unknown. We’ll come in and train your servers and train your staff on how to talk about [the wines] and offering online ordering where customers can go in the middle of the night and place an order and get a confirmation in real time that syncs with our inventory. There was no one else doing that at that time and there is not that same level of care.

We have a warehouse here in Baltimore. We are also the only distributor that was born and founded in Baltimore and operates in Baltimore. Our warehouse is in Clipper Mill—it’s refrigerated. Our delivery trucks are refrigerated. That sets us apart as well: that we respect this product and it’s refrigerated from point A to point B to point C, from producer on a refrigerated container to get here and refrigerated warehouse, refrigerated delivery trucks. So that’s another thing that sets us apart.

Connect with Carlee on LinkedIn

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