A wine for Red Sox nation
Drink a glass of Schilling Chardonnay and help a charity
By Susan Ware news@hippopress.com
Charity Wines will probably sell a fair number of bottles to people who will never open them.
In the next few weeks, New Hampshire will stock Manny Being Merlot, CaberKnuckle and Schilling Chardonnay, each priced between $11 to $13 a bottle.
Drinkable, affordable and sporting a label with the Red Sox players Manny Ramirez, Curt Schilling and Tim Wakefield, these wines are sure to be a home run in Red Sox nation (and $1.25 of each bottle goes to a charity of the player’s choice). Iit isn’t a case of slapping a popular Red Sox player on re-bottled Ripple; these wines are tasty.
On Wednesday, May 31, Charity Wines debuted the first set of wines at a wine-tasting at the EMC Club at Fenway Park. Charity Wines, the philanthropic division of VinLozano Imports Inc, a Massachusetts-based company, was born in January when one of the owners had a vision. In five short months, John Corcoran and business partner Andrew Graff made it happen and brought these wines to market.
At the wine tasting, Corcoran explained that the Chilean vineyard that produced these wines for them was pushed to capacity. With this order, what would have taken them typically 10 months to bottle, they bottled in four weeks.
“We were getting dirty looks for the bottling room when we went down there,” Corcoran quipped.
Dirty looks aside, Charity Wines knew they had to hit the market at the height of Red Sox fever.
But it doesn’t stop there. Corcoran says that they have a dozen more athletes across the country lined up to put their face and name on their wines. The New England Patriots are next. Brady Bordeaux, anyone?
In New Hampshire, Manchester-based RP Imports is bringing the wines to Granite State shelves. David Duhamel of RP Imports says that over the past few weeks his office has been overwhelmed with e-mail and calls from all over the country regarding the Red Sox wines.
“This is huge. People want these wines. Even people who don’t drink wine will buy the bottles and save them. And it is all for great causes,” Duhamel said.
During the wine-tasting, Corcoran said that in presales alone they have raised $100,000 for each charity. These charities are Pitching for Kids (a New England Children’s Sports group) for Tim Wakefield, CHARLEE (a Miami group that provides support services to abused children) for Manny Ramirez, and Curt’s Pitch for ALS (a group helping patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease) for Curt Schilling. The wines are slated to hit state shelves in the next few weeks.
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