Orange Glou

The world’s first subscription service for skin-contact wines

Orange Glou founder Doreen Winkler, a natural wine sommelier and consultant, cut her teeth building wine lists at Michelin-starred restaurants throughout Europe and New York City for a decade before deciding to launch her own business in October 2019. Thanks to her years building connections working with restaurants, she had access to many of the most allocated and sought after skin-contact wines not readily available to the general public, so she used that network to bring the best orange wines to the people! Since launching <1 year ago, Orange Glou has been featured or mentioned by 80+ national and local media outlets (highlights below).

Her dream bar on both coasts

Orange wine is Doreen’s favorite thing to drink, but even the best bars rarely carry more than 1-2 options (if that). But what if, just for a night, she could take over the wine list and serve exclusively skin-contact wines? Thus began the Orange Glou’s popup bars. Each month, Orange Glou partnered with a bar or restaurant in New York or LA to serve 20–30 unique orange wines by the glass. Each event presented a different theme, such as “Meet the Winemakers” at Eveleigh in West Hollywood featuring 15 California producers in-person for guests to drink with and ask questions; and “All Italian” featuring two dozen wines from across the growing regions of Italy at Trapizzino on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Hosting these events gave attendees the chance to taste the types of wines Doreen was curating for Orange Glou’s subscription boxes while having a unique and fun experience interacting with the brand. Giving away unique wine glasses etched with the Orange Glou logo to all attendees lead to lots of love on social media (see header image). The popup bars also had the added bonus of giving us an opportunity to invite media to see what Doreen and Orange Glou was all about.

Pandemic pivot: events go virtual

When in-person events were put on pause due to COVID-19, Doreen began hosting weekly Instagram Livestreams using @orange_glou. Every Monday she welcomed natural wine producers, importers and influences to join her for virtual wine tastings, Q&As, and upcoming box reveals. This helped to expand her audience to people outside of New York and LA while keeping the momentum of her monthly pop-up bars.

Making the her THE source for natural wine

One of our chief strategy goals was to persuade the media that founder Doreen Winkler was the absolute best source for all things natural wine. Inviting members of the press to popup events was a great way to get her on their radar at the beginning, but we also made sure to volunteer her as a source for any relevant consumer or industry stories. Some of these originated through targeted pitching that lead to conversations about what else the writer was working on, some came from HARO, and other leads eventually found us once Doreen’s name began showing up everywhere. We made sure that if someone in the media needed an expert for anything related to Doreen’s experience, that they had access to vetted, fact-checked and well-edited quotes long before their deadline. This investment resulted in numerous placements down the line, especially once stories about delivery services started getting published in droves at the start of the pandemic.