Photo by Erin Nelson.
Rush Gardner, owner of Rush Wines, stands in the lobby of the Rush Wines warehouse in Irondale.
Rush Garner started his company, Rush Wines, by selling wine out of his minivan in 2002. Almost 20 years later, Rush Wines is still selling popular wine brands, educating people in Alabama about wine and has continued to grow its own wine brand, Rush Cellars.
Rush Wines organizes wine dinners, teaching attendees about food and wine, wine presentation and hand-selling, where someone stands in a store’s wine department and helps people pick out wine.
“I’m trying to take people in Alabama that are beer and liquor drinkers, primarily, and teach them about the world of wine,” Garner said. “A lot of people in Alabama are intimidated by the world of wine and by the sheer number of choices on the shelf. They look at a wine list and really don’t know what to order.”
Garner started learning about wine from a company that, he said, didn’t know much about the wine business. The owner of the company bought shipments of wine and “cherry picked” the wines that he wanted and gave the rest to Garner to sell, he said.
“I’d go out on the street, trying to sell these wines that this guy wanted for his collection,” Garner said. “I realized that they’re really not the wines that are marketable in Alabama. People wanted California wines. They didn’t want fancy French wines because they didn’t understand what it was or how to read the label.”
While he was trying to sell wine for his company, Garner saw other salesmen selling more wine than he was and discovered he needed more popular wine, he said. After a few years, he convinced his boss to let him travel to California to recruit wine brands for their company to represent and sell their wines.
“In the process, I picked up approximately 40 brands for this company, all from California,” Garner said. “I would get on an airplane, go set up appointments, pick up representation rights and then that company would be the distributor for Alabama for the brands.”
As time passed, he said, he realized he needed a strategy to create demand for the wines that he was selling. “It’s just like if Nick Saban goes out and gets five-star football recruits but that’s not enough to win championships,” Garner said. “You have to develop these guys into good football players. It doesn’t happen overnight; it takes time.”
Garner was let go from the company after four years, but the wineries that partnered with his former company offered him opportunities to represent them once he got his alcohol distributor’s license, Garner said.
After getting his license and recruiting cheaper wines to sell for his company, Rush Wines developed its own wine brand, Rush Cellars, in 2005. The owner of another company said it would be a good idea because of a buyers’ psychology study that suggested buyers remember one-syllable, four-letter words, Garner said.”
“A guy whose brand that I wanted to represent looked at my business card, and he asked ‘Is this your brand?’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t make wine. I’m a wholesaler, and I want to represent your brand,’” Garner said. “He said ‘Yeah, you can have my brand. That’s fine, but I want to take your business card and put it on a bottle of wine because it’ll sell.’”
Garner said Rush Wines has come a long way since he started it out of his minivan. He now has 15 employees, approximately 350 customers and nine wines under the Rush Cellars brand that are only sold in Alabama. He said through trial and error, he’s learned to identify, systematize and perfect his craft, his company and his brand.
“The funny thing is a lot of people see the RUSH truck around town, and then they see the bottle of wine, but they don’t realize that I’m a person and I just live in Homewood,” Garner said.
Rush Wines is at 2516 Commerce Square W. in Irondale.
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