Drinking in profits: Vendemmia's 29-year-old owner turns Italian wine into Georgia gold

Black Enterprise, Sept, 1996 by Carolina V. Clarke

Todd Alexander's primary goal has always been to enjoy life. His enthusiasm for travel led him to Italy as a high school exchange student. As a junior at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, he returned to study Italian. A passion for vino (the $6-and-up-per-bottle variety) led him back there again in 1992 to learn about the wine making business. He was planning to write a book on Italian wine and wine making, but returned to Atlanta instead to launch a wine import and distribution company.

Now just three years old, Vendemmia Inc. grossed $1.2 million in 1995 and expects to break the $2 million mark this year. "This whole thing is a lifestyle choice," says Alexander. "I decided in college that I wanted to get paid for something I would do for free. How could I go to Italy a lot, drink good wine, eat good food and get paid? This was the obvious choice." Perhaps. But it surfaced only after a few years of pushing hard toward what was then an ill-defined goal. As he admits with a laugh, "All I knew about wines [back in college] was that I liked drinking them."

With graduation approaching, he sent out about 30 resumes to wine companies. A New Jersey distributor, who didn't really have a job available, hired him because he was enthusiastic and spoke Italian. Alexander later went on to work for a retail company, and then returned to Italy to research his wine book. But he learned that many Italian manufacturers were unhappy with their stateside distributors, and he returned home to Atlanta intent on starting Vendemmia, which means "harvest" in Italian.

Alexander borrowed $50,000 from his family to start. He keeps overhead low by using free office space in a building his mother owns, converting its unused basement into a wine cellar. Getting a license, however, was not the three-month process he expected. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms "just couldn't understand why a 26-year-old black guy from the South wanted to import wines," says Alexander, now 29.

For the first year, his was a one-man operation: he did everything from mopping the floor to making wine deliveries in his own Ford Bronco. That year he repaid his family in full. Today, he employs a four-person sales team and a delivery person. As general manager, he's the business builder, nurturing relationships in Europe and California.

Alexander's aim for his business, in keeping with his personality, is ambitious, but not greedy: Four million dollars in sales, he explains, "would be a very good size and still very manageable. After that it becomes a whole other thing, and I wouldn't be having fun anymore."

Vendemmia Inc., 250 Auburn Ave., Suite 103, Atlanta, GA 30303; 404-522-9532; or fax: 404-522-9533