This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, what's up? Thank you for tuning in. Good morning, afternoon, or evening, whatever the case may be in your part of the world. Welcome to Cytosol School and welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. This is our weekly segment where we take a look at somebody whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them.
Now, last week we heard from the co-founder of Muertos Coffee from Sacramento, California. Muertos Coffee, coffee strong enough to raise the dead, and Muertos is all about better coffee that supports first responders, especially firefighters across the country. Now today, in our latest feature, we're gonna go from Sacramento, California to Alabama, I believe, although this person originally from Alabama ended up going all over the world. His name is Heath Porter. We first featured him in episode 1088, 1088.
Globetrotting Sommelier leads popular wine tours. After hosting his wine tours all over Europe, he changed his business model during the pandemic to offer virtual tours and sell private label wine. His tours were called Heathen Wine Tours. Now he has his own brand of Heathen wine. So we'll hear a bit about his business directly from him and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up.
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Hi, my name is Heath Porter. I am Heathen Wines and Heathen Wine Tours. I'm currently located in Charlottesville, Virginia. And my original episode was 1088. So I have two businesses early.
The original business was Heathen Wine Tours, which was something that I as an old school sommelier would tour with intimate groups around the world, giving them backdoor access the way that I've toured as a professional for years. I got started with the tour business because I had my own restaurants and I used to do a lot of wine tastings. And so all of my VIPs would always hear me tell stories about my travels and hanging out with chefs and winemakers. And they would say, "Hey, can we go with you on your tours?" I'm like, "It's my job, it's business, I can't do that." They kept bugging me and bugging me to the point where I said, "You know what, give me a credit card. We'll go do this." Took 10 people to Santa Barbara and had a crazy blowout time.
They said, "Where are we going next? Next thing you know, we're in Italy." Next year I had five tours arranged and I decided I was done with the restaurants and I could do Heathen Wine Tours full-time as a business. Obviously when this little thing happened in March, that went to hell and back. And so now my new side hustle is Heathen Wines. So I was stupid enough to create my own wine label in the middle of a pandemic to keep moving the brand and keep beer in the fridge.
I kept trying to get myself out of doing this wine and people kept encouraging it and kept saying, "No, no, it'll be awesome, it'll be great." And so I did 220 cases with one of the best winemakers in the country out of Santa Barbara, California. And we did the final blend and the bottling and everything together and it's been really, really well accepted and now I'm working on a wipe and possibly a rose and trying to get the tours back on the road as well. But so that happens, I'm just like selling wine all over the East Coast. So I'm just jumping in my car and going by myself. The strong point with that is because of my last three decades as a someone way on the other side of the table, I know who to approach, how to approach, what to look for and how to go about it.
So it makes it sort of seamless and harmless as possible in this day and age of the pandemic. The biggest challenge I'm currently facing is definitely the Delta variants because I thought we were actually back on the road a little bit. I had some tours actually sold and ready to rock. And I still do have a couple of things going but everything that I had planned for the domestic and the fall has just, everybody's canceled on me. Everything's just totally shut down.
So that's a huge, huge issue right now. And then of course, just basically trying to be safe and be on the road and sell even wines when a lot of people don't actually wanna spend time doing face-to-face tastings and a lot of restaurants and resorts are not doing a lot of buying and aren't doing a lot of business. So it's a bad time to be selling your own wine sometimes and to be trying to run a wine tour business. So I don't know about my footsteps because I've sort of carved out a niche for myself that had I not been an old school sommelier, I don't think you can probably do the tours the way I do because it's very hands-on, it's very back for access. But I think it's one of those things like anything, it's everything in life is about hard work and attention to detail and service.
And if you're not willing to instill those three things into what you're doing, it doesn't matter if you're a banker or plumber or a fricking pharmacist or a sommelier, it's just not gonna work. So you gotta grind and you gotta pay attention and you definitely have to give service 'cause everybody wants service for any product. I had a friend who I grew up with, I was in my hometown releasing my wine a couple of weeks ago and he's like president of the bank in town. Now I've lived next door to me my entire life and he's asking me questions about my job, my business and everything. And it's like, dude, this is boring, let's talk about something else.
He's no, man, you're a survivor in the middle of all this stuff. You're making things up and making them happen as an entrepreneur. He never was today at work going to the bank. So he's just sitting there on one side of the world looking at my scope on the other side of the world and it's just like, wow, okay, this is a little mind altering. So I think there's a lot of cool stories like that around the world right now and I think it's a great time to be hearing about the real hustles.
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- Awesome, thanks so much, Heath. Congratulations as well on adapting. It's been interesting to see how people have weathered these challenges in different ways over the past 18 months. Listeners, I want to encourage you to check out Heath's website at heathanwine.com. Heathan is H-E-A-T-H-E-N.
And hopefully he'll be back to proper tours at some point soon. Now the Throwback Thursday segment was one of our most popular new features of 2020. We have kept it rolling all this year as well. So let me know who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. If you've got a question for us or an update, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
I hope you'll come back tomorrow for a new episode. My name is Chris Guillebeau you're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
