We just celebrated an auspicious milestone – Bee d’Vine’s first vintage was released in May 2014. It’s been a roller-coaster journey, filled with challenges, growth, and constant learning.
For 10 years The Honey Wine Company has been leading the innovative edge in the wine industry and getting many thousands to experience honey wine for the first time.
Our journey wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the loyalty and intrepidness of our customers who have been nothing short of inspiring!
Looking Beehind
The story and dream of Bee d’Vine began way before the 2014 wine release, more like 2009. Those 5 years, across 3 countries, were crucial for R&D experiments, strategy, production and aging.
We wanted to create a honey wine like non other. We wanted to define the standard in honey wine.
We weren’t happy with the homemade rustic traditional t’ej of Ethiopia – no offence intended to the 100+ million t’ej drinkers there – nor the sweet and fruit/herb medley of Western meads – again no offence to this tiny but enthusiastic bunch.
So we rolled up our sleeves to build a wine like non-other, the goal:
To perfect a timeless beverage by applying wine science & sensibilities to honey wine for the first time. To produce a fine wine purely from honey & springwater.
But ‘we’ was only our founder Ayele in the beginning. Experimenting with gallon size carboys of honey and springwater alongside grapes from the annual family grape harvest. You can see these gallon size experiment next to grape wine experiments here.
After the 2014 maiden release he often served samples in the evenings at wineshops after his day-job and also on weekends. When not sampling wine, he was fermenting it, doing accounting, website, tradeshows, washing glassware, etc.
Today, the Honey Wine Company has grown to a network of invaluable partners and endearing customers – to whom we are enormously grateful.
We can confidently state that outside of traditional Ethiopian t’ej, Bee d’Vine is the most tasted honey wine in the world.
We’ve had many ‘firsts’ in both the commercial and the manufacturing realms. All these achievements ferment down to making the smoothest honey wine imaginable. We invite you to take 2 minutes to watch our intro video on this approach and our inspirations.
A Few Lessons for Business and Life
Now at the risk of sounding like an insipid business book we offer the following lessons.
Lesson #1
Take your mission, but never yourself, too seriously. Do a dance in front of millionaires, billionaires and millions of spectators, like Ayele did!
Lesson #2
‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’ – example not shareable. More importantly, don’t overestimate the number nor the power of said bastards.
Lesson #3
What seems bad is almost always extremely good (or not as bad as it seems). More than one unsuccessful deal with international airlines left us with years of inventory – which we later sold-out in weeks.
Lesson #4
Thinking dynamically it’s easy to steal home plate in baseball.
Lessons #5 – #10
Be flexible, adapt. Delight customers and yourself!