US: A California Startup Pushes Florida to Legalize Wine in Kegs
US: A California Startup Pushes Florida to Legalize Wine in Kegs
Apr 29, 2013 6(BusinessWeek) - It’s not just tech startups like taxi-hailing app Uber and room-letting service Airbnb that are pushing back on state and local regulations that limit their business models. Last month, I reported on some Kentucky companies trying to upend a decades-old law restricting competition in the moving business. Today, a Sonoma (Calif.)-based wine company is on the verge of reversing a 75-year-old Florida law that prohibits the sale of wine in anything larger than a gallon container.
Wine industry veterans Dan Donahoe and Jordan Kivelstadt founded Free Flow Wines in 2009, with the intention of marketing what Kivelstadt calls “premium wine on tap.” Specifically, they wanted to produce good wine and sell it to bars and restaurants in kegs—cutting down on time, waste, and additional costs related to bottling, packaging, and storing wine in bottles. But when the company started selling its first kegged wine, called Silvertap, in 2009, it quickly learned that restaurants didn’t want one wine on tap, they wanted a bunch.
Comments