Wölffer Estate Vineyard started on Hamptons potato fields in the 1980s, when Christian Wölffer's dream of a Long Island vineyard was such a long shot that he had to lure his own winemaker across the Atlantic with a small exaggeration — Roman was told the estate was "20 minutes from New York City." (It's closer to four hours in traffic.) The winery's first rosé, released in 1992, was so pink and so sweet that Zinfandel drinkers called it disgusting. Today, that rosé's descendant — the now-iconic Summer in a Bottle — is one of the most copied labels in wine, and the business has grown from 20,000 cases a year to 300,000. In this episode of Professional Jealousy, host Natasha Jakubowski talks with Joey Wölffer, Chief Brand Officer and co-owner of Wölffer Estate Vineyard, about the hungover, middle-of-the-night decision at 27 that led her to buy into her father's struggling business instead of selling it, how she and her brother rebuilt the brand around the "soul" of the Hamptons rather than the wine itself, and why she recently turned down an acquisition offer from a much bigger company to protect what she'd built. A Hungover Decision Not to Sell When her father died, Joey was 27, building a career in fashion, and leaning toward selling the family winery. Her mother and older brother, Marc, talked her out of it. "I remember the moment I was lying in bed — I was, to be honest, hungover," she says. "My mom and Max were like, you're not selling... you're just doing it because you think it's what's right, but in the end you'll really regret it." Marc, whom she barely knew growing up, told her, "Nothing would make me happier than being your partner." Looking back, she credits naivety as much as conviction: "If that happened to me now, no way I would have taken that chance. The business was not making money." Designing the Brand Around a Place, Not a Product Rather than starting with the wine, Joey built the brand around the Hamptons itself. "We need to make the soul of this brand the history of the area," she says. "What does this area mean? It's creativity, it's curiosity, it's artists." Summer in a Bottle came out of a three-hour conversation at a pub in East London with a designer her husband tracked down: "We sat there talking about the area and the brand and my family and the history, and became so connected. And he just got it." There was no research behind it — "There was no board. There was no industry research. It was just: cider is big in England, and Wölffer is summer in a bottle." The Label Everyone Copies but No One Can Replicate Summer in a Bottle's floral artwork became one of the most imitated designs in wine. "I've seen a version of that bottle everywhere," Joey says, "but nobody can actually do the artwork, because it's actually printed on the bottle." Her advice for tuning out the copycats flooding the rosé category is blunt: "Don't try to be them. Don't even look at them. Don't even engage with them. You keep doing what we're doing." Turning Down a Buyer to Protect the Brand As Wölffer scaled from a boutique tasting room into Whole Foods and California's Pavilions grocery chain, Joey says she's had to actively guard against consolidation. "We had somebody come to us recently... they were like, well, we're huge," she recalls. "This is my brand, and I have to protect it. Would you hurt my brand? Yes. Is it worth it for what comes of that? Probably not." Rejecting the "Founder Is Sexy" Myth Joey pushes back on how entrepreneurship gets marketed online. "I think social media is such b.s. in the way that they present these founders," she says. "Why don't you present the other side — the tears, the fights — that makes a lot of founders feel a lot better?" Asked about the single biggest misconception about being a founder, her answer is one word: "That it's sexy."
