Sunbox Eleven Winery, More Boutique Wine in More Places for 2010

Grapes mean business.

We introduced you to Sunbox Eleven Winery in May and June last year, and we’re glad to say Miami’s own limited-production, boutique California winery is stronger than ever and looking forward to greater expansion.

We recently spoke with Sunbox Eleven Winery co-owner Sunny Fraser about her and her partner chef Superdave Gordon’s plans for 2010. Here’s what she had to say.

We wanna take Sunbox to the next level. A custom crush facility was a cost-effective way to get in the business, but it’s very cost-prohibitive to put it out in the market and get it to a distributor because of the overhead involved in doing so.

We’ve been building, but this year we decided to really get out there on our own. We went out to Santa Barbara wine country and met with Pali Wine Company, who said, “Well, maybe you guys wanna make wine with us. We love what you’re doing.” They’re allowing us to make our wine there and reduce the cost of making our wines, and get distribution, and this year will be about more growth

We’re trying to get into Broward, Palm Beach, across the state, maybe New York,
so our goal this year is to get it into a distributor.

We’re ready for that next step this year. We have a lot of interest out there, and we’ll see what’s the right fit for everybody and what everybody’s looking for so we can start growing more.

As far as social networking, I can’t tell you how amazing it is, and it’s funny, because our fan pages have over a thousand people. We’re in the top 50 wineries in popularity in the world on Twitter; it was, like, wow, this really makes a difference.

You can’t forget the old-school handshake, face-to-face personal relationship-building, doing followup, being a communicator — gotta have that. But add the component of social networking, and, wow.

Click here for Sunbox Eleven’s website, here for Facebook, and here for Twitter.