It all started - as many entrepreneur stories have lately - during quarantine...

We actually fell in love with Vinho Verde wines when we got ‘stuck’ in Portugal in 2020 – we were living in London when Leigh got pre-approved for his green card to come to the States…the day before the UK went in to lockdown!  

So, having already handed in our notices to our jobs & apartment and unable to come to the states while we had a visa in process, we planned to spend the summer travelling Europe, which was beginning to open up again after COVID. Europe had a very dubious & unpopular ‘traffic light’ system, advising which countries could be travelled to, based on their case numbers, and one of the few ‘green’ countries was Portugal, so that’s where we decided to go at the beginning of July 2020.

We then spent the next year & half researching how to start our own wine import & retail business – which seemed like an insurmountable challenge at the time but we just tackled one thing at a time, until May 2022, we decided we were ready to take the plunge!

We quit our jobs, found a guide & translator (Diego, who is now a very good friend and still an integral member of the team), and headed to the Vinho Verde to learn as much as we could about the region & it’s wine, from its producers.

We then got back to the States, decided which wines we wanted to import, and then began the very difficult journey of actually getting the wines from rural, northern Portugal to Southern California – and on top of that, having to enter the extremely difficult and non-sensical world of alcohol licensing – just thinking about the COLA label process brings me out in a cold sweat!

But thankfully we got our alcohol licenses and managed to move forward with 12 producers and 45 wines – and our first shipment of bottles arrived in November 2022.