Spending a weekend sipping superb wines while savoring the perfect food pairing sounds like heaven. Add in breathtaking scenery and the relaxing ambiance of Sonoma County’s Wine Country, and now you have paradise perfected! This magical wine and food weekend becomes reality on November 1st and 2nd as the Wine Road hosts the 27th annual Wine & Food Affair. A Sneak Peek at the Food Pairings With 50 wineries to select from, there are too many food pairings to list, so here are just a few highlights. If you love Italian-based comfort food, check out: Mushroom and Winter Squash Risotto at Pedroncelli Winery Lobster Ravioli with Vodka Sauce at Pech Merle Winery Tatiana’s Famous Lasagna at Colagrossi Wines If you’d rather pair Mexican, French or Cajun with delicious wines, here are some options: Roger’s Colorado Pork Green Chili at J. Cage Cellars Creamy Mushroom Chicken Facon Grand Mère at GC Lurton Vineyards Alison’s Jambalaya at Mat

Full architectural services for a new 20,000 case winery and remodeling of an existing residence into offices and tasting facilities. For more information please contact us at: info@hallandbartley.com or 707-544-1642

Distributors’ portfolios are more crowded than ever. Getting the distributors’ attention has become nearly impossible, especially for smaller suppliers. But fear not; some strategies can help you break through the clutter and gain the focus you need to succeed. There's always a way forward! Here are ten practical tips to do it: 1) Demonstrate you value their time Suppliers who hope to gain mindshare with their distributors will be very careful about the time demands they make upon their distributors. Time is the one commodity every distributor is in short supply of.  Most suppliers demonstrate a complete lack of empathy for the plight of their distributor partners. By respecting their time, you will immediately elevate yourself among their suppliers. 2) Become more self-sufficient in identifying opportunities Small, medium, and large distributors are completely overwhelmed by the sheer size of their portfolios and the number of suppliers they have. It is no longer

Good sales people know that to sell, it’s more than a good presentation on our product. Great sales people know selling requires active listening. We need to stop talking at our customer (pure presentation/monolog) and create a dialog to talk with our customer. This builds relationships by creating engagement and trust. But we can’t have a conversation without asking open-ended questions to understand more about our customer. When we engage with our customers, we learn about their lives, the things they like to do, eat, drink…By asking questions, we can start to better understand their needs and start weaving the conversation towards wines that fit their lifestyle perfectly! Research shows that we interact with many different types of wine buyers. To simplify, we put these wine buyer profiles into five main types of wine buyers. Each one of these groups has different psychological needs – and when these needs are met, they are ready and happy to buy. The Newbie

Full architectural services for a new 20,000 case winery and remodeling of an existing residence into offices and tasting facilities. INFO@HALLANDBARTLEY.COM

Afternoon Brief: What a Century-Old Grapevine Reveals About a Disease That Plagues Wine Country

In a new study, researchers identified a 120-year old grapevine cutting in the UC Davis Center for Plant Diversity that still contained traces of X. fastidiosa DNA from the early 1900s...