NEWBIES: Pizza Wine – the brand the wine world needs

It’s sparkling red, in a can, and it goes with pizza. It's a level of simplicity that’s sorely lacking in the wine sector.

If there’s one part of the bev/alc world that is crying out for newness, it’s wine.

Luckily for you, we’ve spotted a brand that is truly doing something quite different and quite clever: Pizza Wine. It’s a canned, sparkling red wine that’s made expressly for pizza night. Their philosophy is simple: “Drink it cold, bring it anywhere, and don’t overthink it.”

As a product, it’s a brilliant niche. But what’s so compelling is that last bit: don’t overthink it.

“We could spend hours explaining why this pizza and wine pairing works – how the structure perfectly balances the acidity in the tomatoes and cheese - but that’s not our vibe,” reads their website.

It’s wonderfully unpretentious. It’s easy for people to understand. It requires very little cognitive lift. It’s playful. It’s fast. It’s witty.

And it’s run by founders that know exactly what they’re doing.

From bar to brand

Pizza Wine is founded by people that are deeply versed in wine and food: chef Rob Andreozzi and Liz McDonnell – who also co-founded Providence’s now-shuttered Fortnight Wine Bar.

When Fortnight opened, it was one of the earliest natural wine bars on the East Coast, and at the time few locals knew what natural wine was. Fortnight’s way of encouraging people to take the leap was by always having a $6 glass of wine, vetted by bartenders, on the menu as a gateway option.

And it worked; people would come into Fortnight as beer drinkers and leave as wine fans. “That path from curiosity to being passionate is what drove us at the bar, and is what drives us at Pizza Wine,” says Liz.

Sparkling reds

Running the bar taught Liz a lot about how to bring people into wine. It also taught her that sparkling red has a lot of potential.

“It was easy to say yes to, it was novel, and that was refreshing in a world where they were coming out of stuffy wine culture. People were obsessed with it.”

It was only on tap at Fortnight for 12 months but for years after people would ask for it. And when Liz started thinking about her next project she realised: here was the niche.

“We know that it has a long history and tradition in Italy of being drunk with pizza. Go to any pizza shop in Italy and your house wine is a sparkling red, so it just makes sense to folks who are familiar with that culture. But here, it was still pretty new.”

Quick side note here: The reason it’s such a good pairing is because sparkling red is high acid and medium tannin, and the bubbles help break up fat in a way that still wines don’t.

Easy to get, easy to sell

Pizza Wine feels like one of those ideas that’s so obvious, you wonder why no-one’s done it before. As Liz points out: pizza is the favourite food.

“In the US, there was a survey that says 33 million people would choose pizza as their last meal on earth, which I completely believe. And it makes sense for us to be in that space if we want to make this wine as accessible as possible.”

The messaging and attitude is doing a lot of that work, but so is the brand. It’s bright, it’s straight-talking, and it looks great behind the register at pizza restaurants (and burger places too). There’s no snobbery here – no sense that you might be ordering the wrong thing, or asking the wrong questions.

“That’s why I’m so excited about Pizza Wine,” says Liz. “I love wine. I love the industry. But it was hard to break into. And it is really stuffy and judgemental.”

She says the data also tells a hard story. People are drinking and buying less wine, and the wine industry is feeling the creeping tendrils of worry.

For Liz this is deeply sad – as she points out wine is natural, it supports farmers and it’s responsive to the environment. But historically, it’s gone overboard with some of the messaging - leaving people feeling overwhelmed, or excluded. That’s a problem Pizza Wine is dedicated to fixing.

“People just want to know that it’s high quality, it’s made well and it’s not going to fuck up the environment. Just drink it with pizza. That’s our goal.”

Lastly, in New Rules tradition, we asked Liz:

What’s the brutal truth you’ve learned about building a bev/alc brand?

“I thought I had a brand that would sell itself and no brand is going to sell itself. That was surprising to me because it’s simple and it tells you exactly what it is and does. But you still have to get out there, and you still have to tell your story and ask people to support you. And then, maybe, it’ll sell itself.”

With hindsight, is there anything you’d do differently?

“I spent a lot of time in the brand-building stage, perseverating over documents. I did my full competitive analysis and I wrote multiple decks and I think I wasted a lot of time. I could have done that in a few weeks, and then spent the other five months talking to potential buyers and doing tastings. As a first time founder, that process was important, but in hindsight I wouldn’t do it again. I’d blow through it, feel 80% confident in what I was putting down on paper and then go out and hit the streets with it.”

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THE NEW RULE

Simple brands aren’t stupid brands. People are overwhelmed by messaging and choice, and the easier you can make it for them to choose you, the more likely they are to do so.

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