Eric Matkovich is a Silicon Valley native whose experience working for large multinational IT companies helped him to develop a lifelong curiosity about culture and passion for progress.
Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area was named for being a technology hub where the first microchips and semiconductors used in modern computers were developed. Besides creating much of the infrastructure for the internet, technology companies such as Hewlett Packard and Cisco Systems also launched a generation of innovators. “A lot of what they were building and selling wasn’t taught at universities at that time,” Cape Ardor founder and managing director Eric Matkovich says. “You learned to just jump in, work on problems and find solutions.”
When he began working at Cisco in 1997, the company employed about 12 000 people. By the time he left his position as software product manager in telecommunications in 2009, there were about 75 000 employees. More importantly, Eric had also met Kara van Niekerk, a Durbanite studying interior architecture at a UC Berkeley Extension. They started dating and a trip to South Africa soon followed. “I was blown away by the quality of the wines and the spectacular beauty of the Cape Winelands. I thought, ‘How come nobody knows about this place?’”
Passionate enthusiasm
After their wedding, Eric promised to keep their connection with South Africa alive. “We started Cape Ardor as a US importer, distributor and online retailer for South African wines,” he says. “It was 2008 and the world was in a global financial meltdown. People were scared and tightening their belts. So we introduced Cape Ardor to San Francisco with the tagline Quality. Value. South Africa.”
He first had to convince his partners to trust him with their product. “They took a risk on us, and I still work with many today, including Piet Dreyer of Raka, Achim von Arnim of Haute Cabrière, André Gunn of Iona and David Sonnenberg of Diemersfontein.”
Cape Ardor’s focus on the South African wine category gave local producers a dedicated voice in the US. The company soon established a wholesale presence in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, but getting paid was a challenge. “South African wine was the one category the sommelier was willing to drop if they were out of cash,” he says. “However, we did notice that people from all over were looking for specific wines on our website and we’d get inquiries. The wines people were searching for were ones they’d had while on safari in South Africa.”
Like Eric, these clients had been blown away by the story of South African wine on their visits. “There was no experimenting with a new wine from a far-off place,” he says. “They wanted the stories to take home and revisit with friends. The story in a bottle.”
Boots on the ground
Eric noticed these stories rarely make it to the end consumer. “The wine bar or bottle store becomes the brand and the brand’s purpose is to introduce its clients to something new every week,” he says. “It becomes impossible to get significant traction at volumes that make any sense.” That often leaves producers with little to show for their effort in the States, as importers and distributors are always being wooed by new producers. “You need to have brand managers in place to effectively get clients for the distributors to fulfil.”
“Now, more than ever, data plays a strategic role in understanding who your clients are, what they care about and how they wish to engage with you. Data points are happening whether you’re capturing and using them or not. Sadly, most are not.”
Eric says wineries that understand this will have more choices and more options than wineries that don’t. “The pandemic was a wake-up call for many folks,” he says. “The value of having a rich database of loyal clients you understand and have developed relationships with is golden.” As skill sets and old approaches to market development begin to fade, the way brands are consumed is also changing. “To keep up with a rapidly changing world, wineries need to keep developing a deep understanding of their target consumers, internal systems and people.”
Make it to market
Eric developed CellarX to address this last-mile problem and create a route to market for small producers of quality products who would otherwise struggle to get into America. The platform exemplifies his data-driven approach and relies on a deep understanding of the customer experience and visitor profiles while clearing away the obstacles to the winery’s story.
He has some suggestions for producers looking to reach the American market. “First, it’s much easier and more cost-effective to earn 1 000 customers at your cellar door than to develop them overseas,” he says. “Second, the wines that are the hardest to sell for your importers are often the easiest to sell to Americans at the tasting room. And third, travellers are curious and like to tell stories. Deliver a great story with a strong sense of purpose and quality in the bottle, and they’ll tell your story for you.”
Take the Cape Ardor customer who bought 12 bottles at each of the three partner wineries he visited during a trip to South Africa in 2017. “To date, he has bought over 53 times and bought another 855 bottles from those wineries, as well as a total of over 1 400 bottles trying new wineries. That only happens when the tasting rooms are fine-tuned and well managed. Invest in your people. They’re the voice of the winery.”
A new platform is also in the pipeline. Called CellarX Multimarket (CXMM), it will allow wineries to extend their DTC offerings directly into major markets. “It’s like having a global wine club that you can speak directly to and coordinate the launch and delivery of your wines,” Eric says. “We’re basically removing the roadblocks to growing your wine sales and putting some control back in the hands of wineries.”
“To keep up with a rapidly changing world, wineries need to keep developing a deep understanding of their target consumers, internal systems and people.”
To explore more articles in our December issue, Vat die pad, purchase our digital or print magazine here.
