The Fizz #50: Hilary Cocalis is focusing on sustainability for her line of Sipwell canned wines
Hilary touches on why cans are more sustainable than glass, how she started her business with no outside funding, and how she turns alternative packaging non-believers
For this issue, I spoke with Hilary Cocalis, owner of Sipwell, a San Diego business offering canned wines from sustainable vineyards. I’m always inspired by stories of entrepreneurs taking a chance and launching their own projects. Hilary saw an opportunity to make a wine in a smaller serving size while focusing on sustainability as her number one mission.
In this interview, she talks about what it was like to start a business outside of a wine background, how she works with winemakers and farmers, and why alternative packaging is the future of sustainability in the wine industry.
Margot: I would love to get a better sense of your background and how you got into the wine industry.
Hilary: My background professionally is primarily in beer. Before I launched Sipwell, I worked for Ballast Point, which is a large national craft brewery. I was the Head of Marketing at Ballast Point for almost seven years, and that was my first official entry into the alcohol industry. That really was my time of understanding how the beverage alcohol business works.
During my time there, I learned a lot about marketing and selling beer primarily, but about halfway through my time, we were acquired by Constellation and then became part of this much larger organization that also sold wine and spirits. I got a little bit of exposure in how the wine side of the business works and how different it is from the beer side.
Then, personally, I found that my tastes were changing. It could be that when you work in beer for so long, you want to drink something else, you know? I found that my interests more and more were moving toward wine. I was really interested in learning about how wine is made, how the fermentation is different, learning about all the different grape varieties. I was interested in going to wineries and doing tastings and just wanting to learn more. I started educating myself more, tasting more, and then I decided at the end of my time at Ballast Point that I was ready for a new challenge.
I always had this entrepreneurial itch, and so I decided, why not go for it? Why not take my experience, but put it into a new category and take my personal love for wine and make it into a business?
Margot: That’s awesome that you made that jump. When did you start Sipwell?
Hilary: Our first product went for sale at the end of May of last year. I've been working on it for two years before that—getting all the permitting in place, figuring out how to get the wine made, all the brand stuff, all the legwork. Getting it launched took about two years. The pandemic definitely slowed me down.
Margot: Where did that idea come from? Why did you choose going into canned wines?
Hilary: For me it was really a personal aha moment. I had been drinking wine more at home, but I also just had kids. I have two small kids and I wanted to drink less and wanted a smaller serving size. Especially for sparkling wine—I didn't want to have to open a whole bottle and risk it going flat or find my little champagne stopper and have that not even work well. It was a personal need to have a smaller serving size that wouldn't go flat and wouldn't get wasted.
Coming from beer, I saw how widely cans were adopted and how good it actually could be for the product—and how much more sustainable they are than glass. I thought it would be a no brainer. I had seen canned wine starting to come onto the scene, and I think there's still a huge opportunity for it. I think people still aren't totally on board with it yet, and that's part of the challenge of educating people, why cans and why they might be better. There was also the thought of advocating for a more sustainable packaging.
Margot: What were some of the challenges that you ran into when building the business? Did you raise venture capital money?
Hilary: I did not raise money. In fact, up to this point, Sipwell is still totally bootstrapped. That is a challenge—not having the dollars and the investment behind it, but I do want to grow it more organically and slowly at least to start.
Fundraising wasn’t a challenge, but figuring out how to spend my funds was definitely a challenge [laughs]. Understanding the permitting piece was a big challenge. Figuring out how to do the wine operation—I am not a winemaker myself, so finding the right winemaker partner to work with was a big step. I have a great partner up in Paso Robles—the winemaker is Matt Villard of MCV Wines. I also have a consulting winemaker I work with, Sherrie Holzer, who helped me out on the product side. They’re both great and are experts with this.
Figuring out how to get the wine made, and then how to get wine made that works in a can are the two main steps of the wine process. There are not a ton of people that are experts in putting wine into cans. The wine naturally has to be low sulfur because that's not great for cans. Understanding the pH and all of the parameters for making sure that the product going into the cans is the best quality it can be, that’s really important. That was probably what I spent the most time on as I was getting ready to launch the business.
Margot: That makes sense. Can you walk me through how the wines are made?
Hilary: It's a combination of harvesting grapes and having the wine made. Right now, Matt does the whole program all the way down to the canning. For our sparkling wines, we actually source from other producers up in the Paso Robles area. We get still wine that we then blend. What's unique about the way we make our sparkling wine is that we use can conditioning. The wine is actually fermented again in the can, somewhat similar to traditional sparkling methods, or at least that's the inspiration. We’d rather do that than just force carbonate it.
We ferment it using champagne yeast in the can, which was a method that I developed and perfected—at least on a home R&D [research and development] scale to make sure it worked. As far as I know, there's nobody in wine doing that in a can. It's fairly common in beer and pretty common in cider. It's a cool process—we take the wine, add the champagne yeast, put it into the can, seal the can, and then it takes about a month, four to six weeks, for it to fully carbonate in the can.
The benefit of this process is that it creates a smaller bubble. It's not as aggressive. It's not like drinking soda—it's a much creamier mouthfeel. What's unique is that because we do it this way, the wine sits in the can on the lees, so it actually continues to age, continues to develop flavor, continues to preserve the wine, which in itself is a unique way to ensure that the quality of the wine and the can stays excellent, if not improves over time.
Margot: That's very cool. How do you source the grapes or wine that you're working with?
Hilary: Right now, our minimum is that it has to be sustainably farmed. Either Sip certified or some sort of sustainable certification. We're actually about to release the new vintage of Tiny Victories, which is our sparkling white wine, and that will be the first one where the grapes are farmed organically. Secondly, we’re working with other producers in the area. We’re sampling a lot of wine.
For me not having a lot of roots in the industry, it’s just been working with the winemakers and other folks I've met to make introductions for me. It's been purely a relationship thing. I've been amazed actually at how many folks are willing to help, willing to work with me, willing to educate me on how the grapes are grown or how their wine is made. It's been fun. I've learned a lot in the sourcing process.
Margot: That's awesome. It seems like consumers are not really used to wine in a can just yet. They're used to this vision of beautiful glass, pastoral fields, even though we're really comfortable drinking cider and beer in cans, right? There's a societal shift that has to happen. What do you say to folks who are not used to canned wines to help them get over that initial concern?
Hilary: Absolutely. The first thing I do is, when I have a chance, I pour them a sample of the wine. In our industry, a lot of folks have not put good wine into cans. The people who have had wine in cans, it likely has been less than great quality. I think just first of all, tasting the wine and seeing that there's care in how it's made, and that it's small production, is important. Then, I appeal to the convenience of it.
Our business is in San Diego. The ability to take wine outside, take it to the beach, take it on a picnic, is definitely one way to sell it to folks. Then I talk about the ways that the cans are actually better for the quality with the canned conditioning process. Cans don’t have to deal with light pollution, especially for wine that's consumed fresh. You don't have to worry about oxidization. All of that goes into why cans can actually be better than glass.
The last piece of it for the folks who are really caring and paying attention, I do try to appeal to the sustainability message. The reality is that it's much lighter to ship, it's infinitely recyclable—that’s important to me and my business. I don't know if it's the number one thing a consumer thinks of when they want to pick up a can, but it's something that we try and advocate for and promote.
Margot: How is aluminum more sustainable than glass?
Hilary: Aluminum itself is infinitely recyclable, so it can be made over and over again into a new aluminum product. There's no limit to how many times aluminum can be recycled back into itself. Because of that, aluminum cans are actually made majority from recycled material. So it takes less energy to take recycled aluminum and make it into a new can than it is to pull out new aluminum and make that into a product. An average aluminum can is about 73% recycled material, so it's already made from recycled material.
Then just from a shipping and supply chain standpoint, liquid itself is heavy, but cans are much less heavy than glass. They take up much less space. They require much less outer packaging. All of those things have an impact on the overall footprint of the packaging. Especially for us, where a part of our business is direct shipping to consumers, a six pack of our cans fits in a little box like this [Hilary holds up a really small box that ships Sipwell six packs]. This is two bottles of wine. I mean, you'd never be able to ship two bottles of wine in what's essentially half of a shoe box.
We’re definitely taking into account things like that when promoting our sustainability message.
Margot: Are you able to track your carbon footprint at all?
Hilary: It's on my to-do list. We're trying to ship carbon neutral shipments with UPS and doing research on other ways we can offset.
Margot: That must be difficult to calculate. Some consumers believe aluminum impacts the taste of the wine. Is that something that you hear and how do you combat that?
Hilary: It's definitely something that I hear. The way that I typically combat that, and I have not done labs for this, but my experience, at least in telling the story on the beer side, is that if you are tasting an aluminum or tinny taste, that is because of oxidization or another off flavor. It's not actually from the aluminum itself. They've perfected the technology of the cans where everything is fully lined. There really should not be any metal interacting with the liquid. If someone's getting a metallic or a tinny taste from the can, it's actually from an off flavor that's developed in the liquid.
Margot: What are the cans lined with?
Hilary: That's another thing our industry needs to work on. The cans have some sort of polyurethane liner. It used to have BPA, ours are BPA free, but it still is some sort of synthetic plastic-based liner. I believe as an industry, people are working on alternatives to that, but the standard for food and beverage at this point is a non BPA, but still a plastic liner.
[This is a really interesting article on cans, liner, and glass bottles and their impacts on wine. The link will download as a PDF]
Margot: Gotcha. Where do you find the joy in your work?
Hilary: It comes from all sorts of places. I love meeting new people and getting people to try the wine. I love that moment of “oh my gosh I didn't realize canned wine could be this good”. I love being a business owner. Understanding all the elements of the business and trying to decide what's going to make an impact, how to grow this company from scratch has been a ton of fun.
It's a challenge, but in a good way. I wake up saying, what problems am I going to solve today, and then try and figure them out. I've really enjoyed meeting people in this industry. I'm amazed at just how collaborative and open people are, and willing to share, especially for me who comes in with not a ton of winemaking knowledge, trying to do something where it's a totally different package, trying to appeal to a new type of consumer. In many ways I could be seen as an outsider, even as a woman and a minority in this industry trying to break through that. I've been amazed at the community that I've found and the support that we've had, even as a brand new business.
Margot: That's really great to hear. I noticed on your Instagram that you recently made a non-profit donation. Do you regularly work with non-profits, and is that part of your mission?
Hilary: It is definitely a part of our mission. We have what we call our Sip Responsibly Pledge. We’re taking this idea of drinking responsibly, but having it go beyond moderation. So for us, one pillar is moderation. One pillar is sustainability, and then one pillar is community, and how we can give back to the community. We don't have any sort of official non-profit partnership at this point, just because there are compliance hoops you have to go through to sign up an official non-profit partner and do charitable marketing and that sort of thing. Because we're such a new business and don't really have the size, we haven't gotten there yet, but I do look for non-profits that feel like a fit.
We made a donation to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund earlier this week and work through product donations or supporting local community organizations, we look for more informal ways to give back and obviously as our business continues to grow, I definitely want to do more—especially as it relates to advocating for women and BIPOC business owners.
Margot: I love that. How have you worked with local community organizations in the past?
Hilary: We've donated product for fundraisers and have supported other small businesses. Even though we don't have a traditional brick and mortar winery, we try and build a local presence in San Diego. We’re part of our local business association here in Encinitas. We have participated in nonprofit festivals. We’re still just dipping our toes into it, but it’s certainly something I I'd like to do more of.
We just joined and donated to the Association of African-American Vintners. We’re excited to be a part of that community.
Margot: You're starting your business journey with community support in mind already.
Hilary: Yes, it's really great. Instead of trying to cram it in later, we’re exploring it from the start. I do want to be sensitive because I want to do it in a way that feels right. For me and for our business, I didn't want to come out right at the gates saying, you know, buy this product and we'll give this many dollars to a non-profit or we're 1% for the planet. I didn't want to do it just to tick a box. I want to find the opportunities that make sense and that help support the things that I want to support.
Margot: Is there anywhere right now where you need help or support?
Hilary: Just raising awareness. We’re trying to get our name out there. Anywhere where folks can promote wine in alternative packages, not just cans. I think there's a lot of people doing cool stuff with bagged and boxed wines. I'm actually dabbling a little bit in draft wine and I know other folks are too. Pushing alternative packages for wine will be huge for all of us trying to do that. Other than that, just drink more wine and tell more of our stories!
Margot: A rising tide lifts all boats! Thanks so much for your time, Hilary, and I’m excited to watch your star rise!
You can support Hilary by buying Sipwell wines and following them on Instagram. Did you like this issue? Hit subscribe below and for $5/month, you’ll get these exclusive interviews and tasting note posts on local wines. You’ll also be helping me record more information about exciting winemakers, American history, and help me pay my interviewees who aren’t making wine for their own label.