User:Thewendy/Bottlerocket



Bottlerocket Wine & Spirit is an innovative retail concept located in the Flatiron/Chelsea area of New York City. Opened in 2006, Bottlerocket was founded by Tom Geniesse who created the store with one goal in mind: to make wine less intimidating by making the customer’s shopping experience more fun and intuitive. To achieve this, Bottlerocket presents its inventory by theme - takeout, gifts, poultry, events and more - all laid out with ease in enticing displays throughout the 2,500-square-foot store. Its 365 wines are also organized by country. Each one includes tasting notes, a detailed account describing the wine (vital facts, characteristics, origin, the foods it blends well with, anecdotes) in addition to ratings from prominent publications and indexes (Parker, Wine Spectator, Wall Street Journal, NY Times) as well as the Bottlerocket staff itself. At checkout, customers automatically get all to this information to go.

Bottlerocket incorporates environmentally-friendly “green” materials in its design. The result is a unique space for its unique store concept, which in addition to its displays also includes a lounge and stocked library of wine, food, and cooking books and a children’s play area.

Bottlerocket offers numerous educational opportunities and special events for its customers, which emphasize conviviality and fun as much as possible. The event series has included personalities and authors such as Danny Meyer, Amy Sedaris, Christine Vachon, Jancis Robinson, Tim Weiner, Kiki & Herb and Jay McInerney. Dr. Ruth even stopped by to dispense sex tips for a Valentine’s Day tasting.

History
Born and raised in New York City, Bottlerocket founder Tom Geniesse moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the television business, working on the development and production of several network and cable series and movies, including NBC’s award-winning “Homicide.” Always the entrepreneur, in 1996, Tom started a new venture and co-founded Quisic, taking the best professors from the greatest universities in the world and making their instruction available via the Internet to students anywhere in the world. The company partnered with PBS and found great success producing graduate-level programs with Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and USC’s Marshall School of Business. It also worked with several Fortune 500 companies, developing corporate training programs for customers such as United Airlines, Cisco, Lexus and Citibank.

But Tom was thirsty for even more adventure, and his passion for wine lead him to found Bottlerocket Wine & Spirit. “I wanted to increase people’s knowledge about wine painlessly. Buying wine should be as fun as drinking it, so think of me as a consumer advocate,” says Tom. “In the course of learning about wine myself, I found shopping for wine to be frustrating. The ubiquitous and overwhelming wall of wine in every store, the inherent complexity of wine itself, the hodge-podge of numbered rating systems, confusing wine labels - I figured there had to be a better way.”

And so began the mission and the motto that Bottlerocket adheres to each and every day: empower the wine consumer, one bottle at a time.

Accolades
Local wine lovers as well as the industry press have both taken a shine to Bottlerocket since its inception. The 2008 Zagat guide rated Bottlerocket #2 overall, noting that “this ‘terrific addition to the winescape of Manhattan’” is “an ‘innovator’ among vintners” and “gets an ‘A+ in creativity’ for the ‘eye-catching’ themed displays.”1 The Wall Street Journal praised Bottlerocket for having “…all sorts of new ideas to make the wine buying experience more fun and less intimidating.”2 Paper Magazine proclaimed: “It’s sleek but not slick, mod but not snob, and the wine is so well set up that you can leave the cheat sheet at home…a great place to hang out.”3 AM New York adds: “The wine world attracts people who love life and are fun to be around...[customers and employees at Bottlerocket] are like a huge family.”4

¹New York City Gourmet Shopping & Entertaining. Zagat Guide. 2008.

²"Wine's New Wave - Stores with Shtick." The Wall Street Journal. February 23, 2007.

³ ”Shop.” Paper Magazine. August 2007.

4”/ From New Media to Old Vintages 180°: The Art of Changing Paths.” AM New York. June 27, 2007.