With lean and mean roots, Cellar Angels opened its proverbial doors with all the drama and vigor of a sapling grapevine pushing through terra firma. They began with no professional money, relying heavily on a bootstrap model of raising startup funds through the support of friends, family, and fellow wine enthusiasts. Despite the harrowing maze of paperwork, countless hours spent with Illinois and California-based legal experts, and a hysterically simple yet pivotal call with California Alcohol Beverage Control, their time spent in launch mode was not for naught. Throughout, they were given the life-shaping gift of spending time focused on their truest passion: traveling through Northern California’s Napa and Sonoma counties looking for vintners’ treasures.

Cellar Angels’ Founders Denise and Martin Cody attribute their success to three equally necessary ingredients: their 20-year history of wine country relationship building, their eagerness to provide a channel for wine artisans to share their craft with enthusiasts living outside of Napa and Sonoma, and perhaps the most important, their taste-making customers who yearn to support both small-batch producers and hard-working charitable organizations.

In Napa alone, there are over 1,000 unique wine producers. A whopping majority of them are limited production vintners — crafting wine you’ll never, ever find in your average wine shop — each with a different grape-laden, deliciously nuanced story to tell. And because Denise and Martin believe these distinctive producers are creating drinkable art that simply must be shared, Cellar Angels handpicks the most desired bottles from each of these wineries and makes them accessible to consumers through their Wine Club and Marketplace. Each of the vineyard-to-bottle selections you receive from Cellar Angels is shipped by the producer themselves and directly to your door, with love from wine country.

There are over 1,000 wineries in Napa Valley alone, and most of those wineries produce under 10,000 cases (and are not widely distributed). So how do these small producers find wine enthusiasts, and how do wine enthusiasts find them?

That’s where Cellar Angels comes to the rescue. This company is on a mission to connect wine lovers with limited-production wineries in the Sonoma and Napa regions. They recognize both the need for discovery and the difficulty small wineries have in getting distributed throughout the nation, so they work to connect consumers directly with high-caliber, small-batch wine producers.  

In this episode of VINTed, Scout Driscoll is joined by Denise and Martin Cody, the Co-founders of Cellar Angels, to talk about how they’re bringing limited-edition wines directly to the doors of consumers. Denise and Martin discuss Cellar Angels’ partnership with nonprofits, the accessible and educational tools available on their website, and how they’re helping small-batch producers distribute their wine. Plus, Denise and Martin share how any small winery can increase sales and build a loyal following!