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Bio
DAVID L. GREENE
The original Metro Wine Marketing was started in 1981 as a part time supplement to my restaurant income. My first winery was Brander, followed by Au Bon CLimat, Qupe, and Longoria. All of my initial wineries were from the new and emerging Santa Ynez Valley AVA. A year after I began, Stratford Wines, made in the Napa Valley, commissioned me to sell their wines in Southern California. Niebaum Coppola, Kalin, Frog’s Leap, Hanna, WHitehall Lane, and Chimney Rock Wineries were added to the portfolio in the first three years.
Metro Wines for its first five years functioned as a classic California brokerage. I was paid commission by my wineries to take orders and co-ordinate billing and delivery of their wines to restaurants and wine shops in the Southern California market. Elaine McIntosh joined me in 1984 as a partner, and we sold the business in 1986 to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico to open The Coyote Cafe with Mark Miller.
Our stay in New Mexico last three years and besides working for Miller we worked for several of the top restaurants in town. For one of the years we ran Burr Distributing a beer and wine wholesaler located in Albuquerque and servicing the entire state.
We left New Mexico in 1989 and I took a job as Director of Sales & Marketing for Whitehall Lane Winery in the Napa Valley. After three years I left to join Sanford Winery for eight years; Chalk Hill Winery for one year; Pietra Santa Winery for two years; and Wild Horse Winery for one year. At all my positions my job was directing sales and marketing in the United States and selected countries overseas. For seventeen years I traveled two weeks a month to all fifty states, Canada, and Mexico.
I returned to Los Angeles in January of 2001 and worked for Wine Warehouse in Los Angeles as a consultant for an Australian winery that they imported, Tarra Warra Vineyards of Victoria. When the job ended in December of 2003 I restarted Metro to manage the distributor sales of small, high quality wineries from California.