Prologue.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have mixed feelings about tribalism. From one perspective, there’s nothing more human, more fulfilling, than being accepted by another group of humans. Accepted. There’s a lot of power in that word. To be accepted means that we are not alone. We have the company, and perhaps the respect, of our peers. We have someone to commiserate with during bad times, to celebrate with when things are good. We are tribal. It’s why we still exist as a species. We form groups to help each other survive. We form tribes. And then…. We look around. At the other tribes. At what they have, at what we want, and so on, and so on. That’s the dark side. But what of the good? The light? I wonder that it isn’t the greatest gift we have to offer each other, acceptance into a group. Powerful stuff.
Wine clubs are tribal, with their accompanying members-only events and dinners, special library offerings, discounts, etc. etc. It’s fun to gather with people that like the same wines we do, all that’s needed is an appreciation of the wine and a financial outlay. The financial part might be a stickler, “oh, of course they let you in, you’re paying for it”. Yeah, but you have to pay for most things in life, a certain car, an expensive meal, a wedding ring, we all have different things we’re willing to splurge on. Why not a wine club full of people that like this particular winery, for their particular reason? Get us all together talking and then: Viva la differences! There is always the possibility of falling down some dark hole of pompery and pedantics. Of becoming a snob, or worse yet, a bore, insular and bogged down with certainty of one’s knowledge and beliefs. I concede this, but I’m keeping the clubs, for now. I guess at some point we have to decide if we’re buying wine for ourselves, or the grandkids, but that time has not yet come, and another vintage is upon us. I’m not recommending everyone go out and join the club at every winery they like, there simply isn’t enough wine to go around. Some of the higher level clubs are getting very exclusive indeed, with membership capped at 50 or 100 or so, but don’t worry, there are waiting lists. Yep, waiting lists. Not just in Napa, but right here in the good old FLX. If you have a favorite winery and have been considering their club, you might want to act sooner rather than later.
Anthony Road Wine Company has a club that has become one of our very favorites. It’s a winery that meets our requirement of consistently excellent and interesting wines, many of which will age quite nicely. They have the added benefit of being run by a genuinely lovely family that seems to care about, not only making great wine, but being good members of society. Plus, they have some really cool and laid back areas to enjoy wine in, complete with sofas, comfy chairs, and artwork, not to mentioned the outstanding views off the back patio. It’s become a favorite place to enjoy an afternoon bottle, particularly with the wine club discounts. I’ve mentioned this to some friends who showed surprise that Anthony Road even had a wine club, let alone one of the best in the region. So what gives? We sat down for a conversation on the back patio with Natalee Carroll, the wine club and events manager, to solve this mystery.
The first impression I had of Natalee was that I knew her from somewhere. The next was, oh, she looks like Jodie Foster. I’ve refined things now, and I realize that it’s not Foster she reminds me of, it’s her character, Clarisse in Silence of the Lambs. There’s a toughness that seems innate. Or ingrained. There’s drive there as well, This is a person who has her eye on the future, and needs a problem to solve. We’ve talked to many people in the Finger Lakes over the last few years who got here by complex and convoluted paths. Even so, Natalee has wandered more than most. Her’s is a complicated background story, Why not let her tell it:
The Back Story.
“I’m a military brat. My husband Mike is from Ovid, we met in ninth grade when we were stationed there, but we just were friends. Then bouncing around, I ended up graduating from the University of South Carolina, and I saw on social media that he had been traveling cross country, camping and going to all the national parks. I thought, well, he got cool. I should reach out to him. because I want to do cool stuff too, like move to Costa Rica. He said, sure, I’ll go with you. So at 23, we just packed up and moved to Costa Rica with no idea of what the hell we were doing. We taught English there for two years, which was really fun, and then came back to Ovid.”
“That was in 2012. Mike got a job at Damiani and I got a job next door at the (Finger Lakes) distillery, just to fill the gap while we tried to figure out which country we were going to jet off to next. When Mike does anything, he totally invests. He was learning all this stuff about wine and it was perfect, since the distillery closed at five o’clock and Damiani was open until six. I would just walk over and try all the wines as they were closing up, Lou and those guys were always so welcoming. I also bartended up the road at the Stone Cat for a season since I had learned to bartend in college.”
“Then it was back to South Carolina because I have family down there. I did some caregiving, this very wealthy person offered to pay off my student loans if I would care for his wife for two years. Once my student loans were paid off we moved to Uruguay, since we both wanted to keep traveling. We taught English again for almost a year. The grape there is Tannat, and it’s delicious. We drank a bunch of it poured from jugs. Tannat reminded me of Finger Lakes Cab Franc, probably because it was the only frame of reference I had.”
“We came back to the region in 2016 and I did a year of service with AmeriCorps, trying to figure out if law school was a good idea. I thought, if they’re going to place me at a legal aid office, I can learn a little bit about what goes into being a lawyer before I take out a bunch of student loans. I did a year there and I was like, Oh, God, no, no, no! I mean, it was just really disheartening and depressing. I think the law is fascinating but the bureaucracy was too much for a homeschool brat like me. It was also a question of the amount of money it cost to go to law school, versus how much money you can make as an attorney. There’s no money in practicing the social justice kind of law I wanted to do. Not enough to pay off your student loans anyway.“
“After that, I did a year at Seneca County Department of Mental Health, because it was really about trying to help people. I came up against the same kind of bureaucracy there as the legal aid office. So I got to thinking, hey, I’m really good at service, and through all of these adventures I had continued to bartend, wait tables, clean and flip Airbnbs, it was all about wanting to do something nice for people. Then I saw the ad for the new position of wine club and events manager here at Anthony Road.“
Intermezzo.
A long and winding road indeed, and an origin story worthy of a Marvel character. Those of you that are paying attention might have noticed that Natalee and Mike seem to keep returning in great vintages; 2012, 2016, and of course they were here for the double edged sword that was 2020. I guess maybe look at them as a pair of wine divining rods, or a wide ranging pair of birds, called home by some inner instinct when the conditions are right. Natalee has a tendency to be a bit humble, self deprecating even, just around the edges. She oozes confidence but deflects credit to others, blame to herself. It’s an endearing style, especially in the world of wine, where it can be a bit rare. I’m not doubting that the wines are excellent and the family is worth knowing, we buy their wines by the case, and grab the opportunity to speak with the Martinis and Peter Becraft whenever possible. It’s just that the numbers speak for themselves, from a tiny club to a major one, within the confines of Covid and all while reinventing the business model. There’s some credit due. Natalee comes close to the bone on this when she speaks of “Imposter Syndrome”, a condition that I suspect is not uncommon among the owners and winemakers of the Finger Lakes, who in the last decade have garnered the world’s attention. It’s probably tough sometimes to keep up with your own reputation.
The Conversation.
FLXv: So you land this really cool sounding job in wine, with your eclectic, but not necessarily wine heavy history. What were your first steps when you were hired?
NC: Well, buggin’ Peter, and Lynn at the time, to teach me about wine, let me taste all the wines and just hang out with them. They were willing to teach, and I needed to learn. I knew what malolactic fermentation was, but that was about the extent of my wine knowledge, it was one thing I could throw out there to sound like I knew something about wine.
FLXv: That’s a rather odd single bit of information to have about wine.
NC: I’m pretty sure I got that from Mike learning it at Damiani, because he thought it sounded fun to say. I even used it in my interview because Peter (Becraft) was there and he asked what I knew about wine. I said, I know I like it. Oh, and I know about malolactic fermentation.
FLXv: I could see where it might be intimidating to have an interview with Peter Becraft. He’s as talented at blending wines as anyone in the Finger Lakes. What’s it like to work with him?
NC: I would agree about the blending. He’s also constantly willing to teach and he’s incredibly humble. He’s willing to experiment, and I think that translates well, because he also has a great palate, and he’s receptive to feedback. He’ll bring all of us, anyone who wants to come, into the cellar and give everybody tank samples or barrel samples, and ask us what we think. You can’t take everybody’s suggestions because you’ll never make a decision, but he’s really open to feedback.
FLXv: So, this was 2018, what was the club like when you took over?
NC: They had a small club with 36 members.
FLXv: 36? How many members now?
NC: Just under 900.
FLXv: That’s quite a success story. How did you go about accomplishing it?
NC: It was really just a matter of figuring out who the Martini family and their employees are, and then saying, the reason there aren’t 100, 200, 800 club members right now is because you’re almost too humble. You don’t talk about yourselves and own it. But that’s not who the Martinis are. I get it, it can feel really disingenuous, it can seem somewhat egomaniacal to call attention to yourself. I can be like that about myself, but I have no problem calling attention to others that I think are deserving.
FLXv: You make it sound like it was inevitable that the club would grow.
NC: It really has a lot to do with somebody coming in and saying, you want these wines, they’re really good. Sort of pointing out what was already there.
FLXv: This was all happening during Covid and the time just prior to Covid. How did that influence your plans.
NC: The family had been considering making changes even before Covid. Sarah and Liz wanted to move to a seated tasting model when they took the reins from John and Anne, who are still very active with the winery. So this idea had been around and when we shut down for Covid it seemed the perfect time to move to seated. We were pretty sure initially that the shutdown was only gonna last a week or two, so we were just putzing around cleaning stuff, catching up on things that hadn’t gotten done, anything to keep busy. By the middle of that second week it started to look like it might be longer and I thought, if it’s gonna be longer, let’s get tables. So we talked through a bunch of possible scenarios for seated tastings, because there wasn’t really a lot of that in the area yet.
FLXv: How much had the club grown by the shutdown?
NC: I think we were still under 100. Like 80.
FLXv: So the seated method has been good for club sales?
NC: We found that once we had people really enjoying and experiencing the wines and the place, it became very easy to talk about joining the wine club. It doesn’t have to be this weird sales pitch that nobody wanted to do, when they were working at a tasting bar with 20 people crowded in. You’d be pouring wines and at some point you would say something like, so our wine club has these features, if you join you’ll get blah, blah, blah. And most people weren’t interested in that pitch. So we worked through some practice runs, it was really fun. We practiced on each other before we reopened. Then, that original handful of club members all got invites to be our guinea pigs for opening weekend. We said, please come in and try out this new experience. Tell us what we got right and what we could do better.
FLXv: What has been your approach to rolling with all these changes, in a position you were pretty new in?
NC: I fake it till I make it. Which I’ve done most of my life. Not ideal, because I think it does help you develop impostor syndrome. Maybe it isn’t the best thing to do, but I was really lucky in that [the Martinis] gave me so much freedom to figure it out. And there were a hundred mistakes made along the way. Like, turns out I’m not a graphic designer. I tried to make club brochure inserts and they looked like a sixth grader’s art project. They were terrible. But those first forty members, that’s what they got. You have to start somewhere, and the family gave me the freedom to make mistakes and figure things out.
FLXv: What can you tell people about the club?
NC: It’s a pretty standard structure. I didn’t do anything crazy. The main thing that got us that growth was really taking advantage of the shutdown in March of 2020. I knew that the family had wanted to move to the seated tasting model, we had talked about it and how much nicer of an experience it would be. It’s also a better way to showcase your wines because it’s a more intimate experience.
FLXv: What do you think sets your club apart.
NC: Aside from the fantastic wines? I hope that’s the focal point. But after that, I hope it’s that we’re genuinely appreciative of the support and we want to share this place and the Martini family story and Peter’s wines. We have great member benefits, but I don’t know that they are that distinct from other clubs in the area. Actually, I think that one of the best benefits of being a club member is that you get these absolutely ridiculous videos of me tasting through your wines. That’s probably a great perk.
(Smiles self deprecatingly.)
FLXv: You’ve said you have very little formal business training, and you downplay your wine knowledge, but you seem to have been pretty good at changing things on the fly, responding to threats and creating opportunities let’s say.
NC: I think it’s part of my wacky background that crisis is good for me. I do pretty well when people are in panic mode, very good at being like, no, no, hold on, let’s figure this out. It might be from being the oldest of four kids in a very chaotic family, perhaps I’m just comfortable with this family. The Martinis and Peter have so much to offer, they just needed somebody to shout about it. They’re really good at inviting people to be a part of it, we have a lot of long time employees, teachers and students that work in the summer and come back year after year, but there’s always some new fresh faces too, which is great. So once everyone got comfortable with understanding what the club was, it became very easy to talk to their tables, because you’re already in a conversation with them about the wine and about Peter. And then they might say, oh, do you ship to our state? And then there you go...
Endnote.
The most interesting thing I discovered while speaking with Natalee is how a seemingly random series of jobs and experiences can give a person just the right combination of skills to be perfect in the job at hand, if they can find the right place and time. The right family. I’m reminded of some old war movie, perhaps it was an Alistair MacLean novel, where a person had just the right background for some espionage job and saves the day by speaking the right three languages, plus they were a locksmith in civilian life, and played lacrosse in college. You get the idea. Natalee certainly brought Amy and I along for the ride, we joined the wine club during Covid because of a targeted, yet not overwhelming email campaign. We were lured in by the story, and once we met this bundle of energy, this person at the right place and time, with her irresistible enthusiasm for these wines, this family, this winemaker, why, of course we were hooked. It really does seem in hindsight that it was all inevitable, but don’t kid yourself, modesty aside, Natalee has done the work. I look forward to many more afternoons on a comfy couch, sipping wine at club member prices, and being an honorary part of the family. This is absolutely the best part of tribal, and we’re all welcome to join.
Cheers, Jerry
3 responses to “Joining the Tribe: A Conversation With Natalee Carroll.”
(Beaming with pride…) Yeah, she’s pretty amazing.
This was a great article!
Thanks! It’s fun to write when you have such an interesting topic.