Unico Zelo cofounder Brendan Carter called it the company’s busiest start to the year ever.

This week, he has been doing blind tastings on a canned drink that will launch in coming months.

The team has also set up a new onsite studio for its growing YouTube channel, Wine for the People, and has had almost constant feet on the ground in the United States to meet with distributors, host tastings and catch up with the people who drink their wines.

Unico Zelo’s focus is away from the biggest markets like New York; Portland, Minneapolis, Boulder, Oakland and Seattle are where it has found its niche.

The Unico Zelo team has been making inroads in cities with “young people who care about the environment and just happen to drink” and in university towns, said Carter, but that is not to say it has been effortless.

“I don’t think anything about America is easy,” said Carter.

“Sales, in general, is hard for wine anyway: the category is oversaturated and has a lot of complexity, especially when you’re moving glass bottles and alcoholic product large distances.”

Around 25 per cent of Unico Zelo’s output heads to the US.

“We could easily send more, but we keep them on a tether,” Carter said.

“We have been a responsible for-profit business from day dot – there is no strategy we will ever employ that involves blitz scaling, loss leaders or anything like that.”

It means that markets like New York, where ‘paying to play’ is common, are not on their radar.

“Although we’re more than happy for other [wine brands] to spend their money there and we stand out of their way.”

Carter was recognised with the Creative Thinker award at the InDaily 40 Under 40 Awards in 2020 for the company’s sustainability practices and he is resolute in doing most things differently.

Unico Zelo’s philosophy is that their wine should represent a sense of place – that is, it should also ‘sell Australia’ – and to stay true to this, there is a self-imposed rule that the majority of product must be sold on home soil.

“It’s really important that people within Australia actually love your stuff. Otherwise, we’re selling [wine drinkers] a fake idea,” Carter said.

Avoiding cultural appropriation and the ‘Fosters effect’, he believes, will stand Unico Zelo in good stead as a growth strategy, even while he acknowledges it is ultimately limiting.

“When people do eventually come [to Australia] and they realise that 90 per cent of our population lives within 50km of the coast, that we are one of the highest seafood consumers per capita, that we’re having bahn mi for lunch and not meat pies, our influence from Southeast Asia, etc, and the desire for young people in this country to really claim that identity as unique and their own … I think when you are selling a bottle of wine that says wine of Australia on the side of it, it needs to be a real, authentic Australian experience,” he said.

“Otherwise, it’s going to come all unravelled, isn’t it?”

Similarly, the team members do not temper their Australianness. Carter said their accents, directness and transparency “give a sense of authority” when it comes to selling Australian product.

“But there’s also that casual, warm nature, so other people go, Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to be so friendly,” he said.

The YouTube channel and overseas distribution are to some extent intertwined.

Wine for the People has possibly the most active Discord channel in the wine industry globally, with members organising their own meetups to take a bottle and share photos, ratings and tasting notes. The meetups span the globe, from Boston and Chicago to The Netherlands.

Meanwhile, most of the audience for the actual YouTube show, which mixes education and entertainment, are in the US.

There are considerable challenges facing the wine industry at the moment – among them climate change, a wine glut and changing consumer tastes – but Carter said his team embrace left-of-field thinking and opportunities.

“We’re not really the type of team that subscribes to doom and gloom, we look at a problem much like looking at a Rubik’s Cube – it’s just another puzzle with a different set of rules that we’re gonna play.”

That has included accepting an invitation from one of their biggest fans in the US to host a wine tasting in a private home.

Carter’s attitude was they were already there doing business, so “why not?”.

He said the company’s greatest strength was its culture of transparency and “really healthy failure”, both internally and in dealing with other companies.

“We are so, so, so happy to be wrong on the path to being right – and the quicker we can do that, the better,” he said.

“We’re constantly battling [our own] biases … we’ve made products where we’ve invested a large amount of our time, energy, effort and money into it only to realise later that, throughout that entire creative process, we were so incredibly blinded by bias that we ran very quickly in the wrong direction.

“That left us holding a lot of stock with warehouse fees and meant that we had to resort to discounting, which destroys brand.

“It’s catastrophic, especially for a small business, to not be aware of bias.”

Competing against large investor-backed wineries meant the small, family business had to “use other things that those companies don’t have”.

“Once you start counting the dollars, then you start counting the time. We kind of don’t count time in a sense.”

That means things like their focus on sustainability and social impact (they are B Corp certified) are lived values.

When Team Unico were growing sister company Applewood Distillery, they were acutely aware that the story about its native ingredients was not theirs to tell.

“We were faced with this really interesting conundrum of should we just stop then?” Carter said.

A team member, a Kokatha man, suggested they go onto Kokatha country in the desert north of Ceduna to work with the traditional owners. Now twice a year, a team from Unico Zelo join them to maintain some of their sacred sites.

Working on their social impact is also the reason why that canned drink mentioned earlier is guaranteed not to be wine.

Because as Carter notes, “why would you put two and a half standard drinks” in a single can.

While not giving away the new product in a can, he said Unico Zelo was trialling different mid-strength drinks.

“We’re very late to the piece, aren’t we? There’s plenty of other people putting things in cans, but often we’ll stand back and allow other people to give things a shot,” he said.

“We take a wine industry perspective with it [as] the wine industry works on camaraderie, doesn’t it?

“If we realise the problems aren’t actually being solved, and maybe they just need a bit more critical mass of competition [delivering more shelf space and visibility to products], we’ll come on in and have a bit of a play.”

The 40 Under 40 Awards program is helping to bring attention to a new generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders in the state. The winners will be announced at a gala event on Thursday, June 27.