The Fizz #53: Molly Ringe of Seattle's Molly's Bottle Shop brings everything back to community
In this issue, Molly Ringe talks about why she doesn't have bottles under $20 in her shop, and how she participates in community support and advocacy.
For the 53rd issue of The Fizz, I spoke to Molly Ringe, owner of Seattle’s Molly’s Bottle Shop. Molly is a wine shop owner and activist, serving on the board of The Vinguard, an organization committed to promoting equity through wine.
In this issue, Molly and I talk about how a health issue brought her to natural wine, her commitment to her buyers, and how her activist roots keep her tied into community support and mutual aid. Molly outlines how she thinks about stocking her selection, focusing on natural wine and female/POC winemakers, and we touch on what it means to price a bottle of wine, and many of the aspects going into the final cost on the shelf.
Margot: Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into the wine industry? What got you here?
Molly: Sure. I got into wine when I was really quite young, my early twenties. Quite young considering I'm now 50. I just loved it. I was in the restaurant business, and I traveled a lot. I was just having fun with wine, but then I got breast cancer when I was 30, and my oncologist told me that I couldn't drink wine anymore. The very condensed version is that I learned what was in the wine that I had been enjoying and drinking. That’s when I really jumped into the act of becoming a sommelier.
I was bartending at night to keep my feet in the restaurant business. I quit my corporate job and became a wine director and wine buyer. I started learning more and more about natural wine and became a bit discouraged about wine in general, particularly in Washington state and California, because there were just so many additives and chemicals being used in the winemaking process. I began taking classes and going to U.C. Davis, going to Washington State and learning about putting on a hazmat suit to apply things to wine, as well as to vineyards.
That was really disheartening for me, and proof positive of what my oncologist had said. Here we are twenty years later. Luckily I found a little place for rent and opened a shop.
Margot: That’s quite a journey! How do you think about the selection of wines that comes through your shop?
Molly: Originally, I had chosen to follow the guidelines for Raw Wine Fair, which is a fair put on by Isabelle Legeron who was one of the original champions of the natural wine movement in the United States. Then I learned about the INAO, the French government's regulations. They are pretty much in the same mindset, but they allow even less sulfur. We pretty much abide by those principles at Molly's Bottle Shop. I would say that is what I would perceive to be natural wine, or what I would call natural wine.
The wine community, as a general rule, abides by the French government's wine laws. They've been held up as the guideline. For example, sparkling wine made in any other place is not called champagne, unless it's from Champagne. As a global wine community, we agree with that. I feel that if the French government has said that these are the rules about natural wine, that's a great starting point. So often I'm told, well, there are no regulations, there are no rules. It's all ambiguous. It's up in the air. I just point to the fact that they actually do have regulations, so we abide by them at Molly's, generally speaking.
There's been one wine that I've allowed to be over 30 parts per million of sulfur, but most are well under 30, if any. Native yeast, no herbicides, no pesticides, practicing biodynamic, if not certified. I know certification is very challenging. I've been blessed to be able to travel quite a lot and to verify. That's a really big deal for me. I have a lot of customers who, and myself included, who have allergies or break out in hives, have really bad reactions to conventionally made wine, and some of them have even given up wine. When they come into my store and we have these conversations, and they're willing to trust me enough to take a risk on tasting a glass of wine, I find that's a really powerful thing. I would never want to betray the trust of the people in my store. I go and I verify it, whenever humanly possible.
Luckily, the natural wine community is really beautiful and amazing and inclusive. If I haven’t verified personally, or I can't get there, I can call a close neighbor and say, hey, can you verify this for me?
Margot: Beyond the natural aspect of the wine, how do you think about what to stock?
Molly: Great question. I am an activist at heart, and I try very hard to put my money or my business where my heart and belief systems are. I try very hard to support small local importers and distributors if I can. The end consumer should recognize that the importer is a different person than a distributor. I try to support the really small producers and to have women predominantly, or underrepresented communities in my shop. I serve on a board of a group called The Vinguard, and the goal is to talk about and uplift voices in the natural wine community that are not cis white men.
Of course, I'm not going to turn down a beautiful wine that has been made well, just because it happens to be by a white man. My goal is to have at least 60% to 70% of my wine being made by women or the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC community.
Margot: You mentioned that the natural wine community is fairly inclusive, which is both great to hear and new for me to hear. I'm curious about whether that inclusivity is in terms of information or human inclusivity. As you think about which wines to stock, are you also considering human treatment and if so, how do you verify that sort of thing?
Molly: Yes, of course we do consider that, and again, I think that comes back to trusting your importer. If you're buying from a distributor, we enter into a three tier system, where the producer sells to the importer who then sells to a distributor. How is that being verified along that chain?
I don't carry some producers that I've heard are doing sterile filtration, because if you're doing sterile filtration and lying about being natural, there are probably other things—cracks in your foundation. Reaching out and talking to their community members and being able to travel is really important. That hasn't been as possible as much in the pandemic. Generally speaking, I think it’s a very transparent community that tries very hard to help and uplift each other.
Margot: Do you actively ask those types of questions of your reps/distributors/importers? How do you go about that?
Molly: I'm pretty straightforward. Yes, I just ask, and I think if I’m perceptive and if I sense hesitation, I’ll just clarify that it’s not a judgement on the person I’m talking to. I'm just asking these questions because they're really important for me. How do we make sure that we together are acting in the best interest of the producers, as well as the people who are consuming the wine? I would say 99% of them have either gone back and looked for me or have said “this isn't a right fit for you because I don't know the answers or I heard some rumors” or something like that. Very rarely do I buy wine sight unseen. It has happened, and twice I've been burned by that.
Margot: What do you think is the best possible situation moving forward? Often reps or importers don’t have information on how harvest workers are treated, or domestically, if employees have health insurance. If you can dream it, what would the ideal situation be for buyers around transparency in the future?
Molly: I would say my dream would be to have a community very similar to the original Gang Of Four, who decided to get together and hold each other accountable and also to gather information, right? You can't be everywhere. If we form a community of buyers to agree that this is our definition of natural wine, and our definition of accountability and transparency in the community, and draw on each other's experiences and knowledge—then I think we could change a lot of minds. I've always thought it would be really cool to have a sticker that says hey, we're abiding by this standard.
Natural wine doesn't just mean natural native yeast. It doesn't just mean grown organically or biodynamically. It also means that people are paid a living wage. People are treated well. They have access to health insurance if they’re United States based—in Europe that might not be as big of a thing as it is here because they do have universal health care. People live in homes that are actually clean and have access to running water. Then, I feel it would be very much easier to have that dialogue with the consumer because in a retail store, I get told five, six times a day, “I didn’t know wine wasn’t natural”. If we said, well, this is a community of people who've come together and made this statement around our guidelines, then we could really make an impact.
As a side note, I've been traveling to Mexico a lot, to the Northern Baja and the wine scene there is amazing. It's shifting to be more and more natural, but there's a lot of resistance and pushback to the word. They just see the term to refer to wines that are super funky and not good. They don't want to be associated with that. There are so many women making wine in Mexico that are fierce, amazing, incredible women and they're just out there on their own. If we had that group, then those people could be brought into the community easier, and then uplifted and amplified with access to resources that they may not even know exist right now. They might not know to reach out to you or other people spreading the word about wine and natural wine in particular.
Margot: That's a really interesting idea. Shifting into pricing, I think many consumers, when they reach for a bottle of wine—I definitely know friends and family who are this way—if it's $20, it's already too expensive. You must be crazy to spend over $15 for a bottle of wine. What does it mean to price a wine, and how do you think about cost at your shop?
Molly: I tell my customers and my staff—you have to think about it in this way. Do you go to the farmer's market? Do you care about the groceries that you buy? If you go to the farmer's market, chances are you're buying organic. You care about what you're putting into your body. And yet you are unaware that wine is exactly the same thing. It's an agricultural product.
These people have to make a living of some sort, and by the time the direct importer brings it in, they cut out 30% to 50%, sometimes 60% of a price increase. Then for me to put a bottle on the shelf, if I mark up the average grocery store price, I will be out of business in five minutes because I don't sell cheese and tortillas and bread whatever else gets sold in a grocery store, which is where they're making their money. I think education is a big part of this. Most of my regular customers are pretty educated and aware of the costs.
Don't just believe me, go look it up. What is a direct importer? What is a distributor? What are the differences, what does it cost to put that one bottle on my shelf? If a distributor pays five euro for a bottle of wine, by the time it hits me, it's going to be $15. It's $1.20 roughly to ship a bottle of wine—one bottle of wine. It's a dollar to put it in a glass bottle. Then it hits New York or Oakland, and then it has to be trucked over. Gas is $6. Diesel is $7 a gallon right now, at least in the west coast. I want to pay my people a living wage, and they all have a path to ownership. How do we do that? You won't find a bottle under $20 in my shop. That's really hard to do. When you're selling and supporting small businesses, it's not possible.
If price is your sole motivating factor, my shop is not a good fit. We forget that wine is still a luxury product. It's not the same as the price of bread for example. There's a reason why the French government put a cap on what baguettes could cost. That's necessary. Although I would say the most French people would argue that wine is also a necessity.
The big conversation we've been having at the Vanguard is how do we make sure we're supporting people who pay a living wage, who are getting paid themselves, and make it accessible for marginalized communities. At Molly's we have a “love you discount”. Maybe it's a regular who lost their job or fell on hard times or is part of a marginalized community. We just add the love you discount and ask them to come back, hang out, have a free glass. If they want to learn about wine, we’re here to talk. In that way, we try to make sure that those community members do still get access to wine.
Margot: Awesome, thanks for explaining that. I saw on your website that you've signed the wine equity pledge. Can you talk about what steps you're taking in your store to make sure that you're moving forward in diversity and inclusion?
Molly: My goals were to have mostly women employees—I wanted to have a 75% female workforce. There's five of us, so it's very small, but it's at least 60% of women winemakers or marginalized communities on the shelf. My goal is to actively seek that out and support them. We're taking a course together as a team called diversity and wine leadership. I participate with the Vanguard I serve on their board. We’re putting together a wine fair right now that is largely female producers.
One of the challenging things we have in Seattle is that it is a very white city. I would love to have more people of color on my team, and to support them and buy their wine. It's hard to find. We're trying to find all different ways of supporting these winemakers. There was an amazing Georgian woman who was in danger of losing her vineyards, and we just held a little fundraiser. 30% of our sales went to that cause, which means I make no margin, but way more important that this person keeps their vineyards. We just raised some money and we sent it off, no big fuss. We're trying to do lots of little things like that to put our money where our mouth is. In ways that maybe aren't as hashtag-y.
We support a queer rugby team—we find little things in our community where we can support and help, that maybe aren’t even necessarily wine related. During the pandemic, we delivered pizza to the occupied zone. Right now, we’re raising money for Ukrainian refugees.
Margot: That’s great to hear. Thanks so much for your time, and I hope to come by personally one day and chat at the shop!
You can support Molly by buying wine at either of her two locations, or online. Join the bottle club to be a part of the community wine conversations. Stay up to date with what Molly’s Bottle Shop is doing by following them on Instagram.
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