Wayne (left) and Harvey Chaplin of Southern Wine & Spirits of America Inc.

Not very many companies can claim to have created the market they lead today, but Southern Wine & Spirits of America Inc. can at least make a compelling argument in this regard.         

Not only is the company the largest wine and spirits distributor in the United States, but it can claim responsibility for the fact that wine often has its own aisle in the supermarket today.  

“It’s really due to our single-minded focus on the business,” Chaplin says. “This is our business; it’s the only business we know. We have a skillful focus on the wine and spirits end of the business whereas many of our competitors are focused heavily on beer.”  

Currently, Chaplin says, Southern Wine & Spirits is adjusting to the changing economic climate. “I think the wine business is changing,” he says. “What we’re experiencing is a bit of a channel-mix change; a change where we’re seeing a lot more of the business coming from the off-premise and a softening of the on-premise.”

Even though restaurant sales have tapered off in recent months, Chaplin says there’s no reason for distributors to panic. “The good news is that many people are really not passing up the opportunity to consume wine today; they’re just consuming it at home.”

Southern Wine & Spirits is promoting this trend through cross-merchandising between wine and take-home foods at grocery and drug stores, supermarket chains, independent retailers and mass-market merchandisers.

Chaplin says given Southern Wine & Spirits of America Inc.’s presence in 38 states and counting, the company will continue to strive for as much as it can in the future. “We’ve always had the attitude … that in business, many people are just happy to have their fair share of the pie, and one of the things that makes Southern Wine & Spirits so special is we always shoot for 100 percent of whatever we’re going after,” he says. “If we miss and get 90 or 80, it’s way more than our fair share, and I think that’s what has helped to make us successful.”

Building the American Wine Market from Nothing
“The wine business is a very important driver for Southern Wine & Spirits,” Wayne Chaplin says, but he conveys that when the company was founded, the wine business was only just budding. A lot of the growth in wine for the company as well as for the nation can be attributed directly to Senior Vice President Mel Dick, also President of the company’s Wine Division. Dick says that when he was hired in 1969, he had to start from the ground up.

“Everyone I told that to said, ‘What wine division?’ because we didn’t have one,” he says. “I was hired to put them (So uthern) into the wine business and to develop a wine offering at the very beginning when we were basically a liquor company.”
Despite the fact that a wide variety of wines can be found at any supermarket today, Dick says it was much more of a niche product when he got started. “In 1960, 60 million cases of wine were sold in America,” he recalls.

“Most of that was port, sherry, muscatel and dessert wines. Very little table wine was sold; the table wine that was sold was basically marketed on the East Coast and consumed by Italians, Portuguese and people from Europe who grew up with wine.”

In time, however, Dick built the company’s wine division into an engine that helped propel domestic and imported wines higher into the public consciousness. “My approach was to develop wine-only salesmen and to make those spirits salesmen more wine-knowledgeable,” he says. “Back then, I had to do it myself; I studied, I tasted, I traveled the world, and it became a labor of love,” Dick continues. “Today, there are so many people who are so well-trained in the industry – all of which helps a consumer learn so much about our industry when making a wine choice.”

–This story originally ran as the cover of the March/April issue of Food and Drink.