Seven Fifty

So first and foremost, we at squire have no commercial affiliation with seven fifty, but admittedly we thinks its one of the most simple and brilliant tools for the wine professional.  Our goal with squire wine co is to create the strongest wine community in Chicago by transparency of events and job opportunities.  What seven fifty offers is transparency of what wines are available in the market. 

If you don't already know sevenfifty.com is a tool for wine buyers as well as wine suppliers and distributors.  On the buying side, it allows one to scan through all the distributors offerings online with pricing listed, but you can also search using many different criteria as well which means if you are looking for what wines from the Finger Lakes are available, it will give you a showing of the entirety of whats available using all the distributors that are signed up.  

When I worked in NYC there were over 100 distributors signed up to choose from.  Presently for Illinois we only have 4 distributors signed up.  For this tool to be truly effective we need to get more distributors to sign up.  I know that seven fifty actually connected me to different distributors that I had never used before because they were part of the database and offered a producer I had been looking for.  

What I had never realized before I actually met with them is that as helpful as seven fifty is from a buyers side, its twice as helpful from the distributors side.  I can request tastings from the site as a buyer, but the distributor can track what I've tasted and what I said about it.  Let alone all the other fun things, like building tasting sheets and more.

To make our wine culture better we need as many tools as possible at our disposal and I think seven fifty is a great tool to keep us and our wine programs as dynamic as possible.  But we as buyers and as reps as well need to get more distributors to sign up.  This tool can only be as good as the community of distributors signed up for it.  

So buyers if you haven't signed up, all you need is your liquor license number and you can play around with the site and see how awesome it will be once its fully populated.  Tell your reps that you want them to be on seven fifty.  Lets continue to create transparency and community in the wine scene in Chicago.

Squire Wine Co