Maivino is a female-founded wine company that offers high-quality, “fancy” bagged wine. The company sources sustainably farmed vegan wines from areas like Columbia Valley in Washington and packages them in air-tight pouches that keep the wine fresh for 30 days.
We caught up with founder Mai Vu to learn more.
What inspired you to start Maivino?
Most wine is served as it was 400 years ago — in a bottle that’s too big for most individuals to consume. I started Maivino because when I was a single lady living alone, I hated opening a bottle when I only wanted a glass of wine. While there were boxed wine options, most were mass-produced and delivered in a four-bottle bladder.
Tell us a little about the company:
Maivino is a female-founded wine company that makes drinking good wine easy.
Making wine easy means removing the analysis paralysis from wine selection. Through simple tasting notes, we tell you exactly what you’re buying. Easy also means making good wines more accessible on an everyday basis. We do that by producing and sourcing sustainably farmed vegan wines and packaging them in air-tight pouches that keep the wine fresh for 30 days after your first glass.
Talk a little about how the packaging reduces wine’s carbon footprint:
Globally, wine output is at its lowest in 60 years, with experts placing the majority of the blame on climate change. Grapes are particularly susceptible to minuscule changes in temperature or soil. Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine critic, recently implored readers and consumers to “demand that the wine industry take action” on climate change and move away from the heavy glass bottle toward better and more sustainable packaging. Our pouch packaging reduces wine’s carbon footprint by 80%, compared with bottles, mainly because its transportation creates drastically fewer greenhouse gases.
Tell us a little about your background and what brought you to this point:
I started working in advertising because I loved storytelling. However, after a decade in the industry, I found myself getting bored. I was bored because the products we were selling weren’t matching up with the stories we were telling about them. I then realized that it wasn’t storytelling that I loved — it was helping people through storytelling. Thankfully, wine is very confusing, so there is still a lot of storytelling to be done.
How have you had to pivot Maivino due to COVID-19?
Our plan for 2020 was to be fully retail-focused. In March, we had just brought in our first red wine, and then COVID hit. Though you’d think that would be a great thing for us — many wine stores stopped taking in new products. They, too, were stressed because they had to manage the influx of orders while dealing with the unknowns of COVID. We quickly pivoted and started creating lo-fi ads on our iPhones and running them online. Fortunately, it worked, and best of all, customers who took a chance on us came back to purchase more.
What’s next for you and Maivino?
We’re looking to add more wine to the portfolio with different flavor profiles to give our customers more options. So, I’ll hopefully be back on the road, making some wine as well as searching for new wines to bring into the mix.
Visit maivino.com for more info.
