Crushing It!

Crushing It!

In the spring of 2006, Gary Vaynerchuk stood in the basement of his family's liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey, talking into a camera. The setup was not impressive. A desk, a spittoon, a few bottles of wine arrayed on a table behind him. No crew, no studio lighting, no PR team. Just Gary, a Flip cam, and a glass of Riesling he was about to describe as smelling like gasoline and apricots.

He called the show Wine Library TV. His father, Sasha Vaynerchuk, a Soviet immigrant who had opened Shopper's Discount Liquors as an 800-square-foot shop on a side street in Springfield in 1983, had no idea what to make of it. The store had grown steadily over the years, reaching somewhere around $4 million in annual sales by the time Gary came home from college. Gary had grown up stocking those shelves, making $2 an hour as a fourteen-year-old, counting out change and learning the difference between a $9 Bordeaux and a $90 one by taste rather than by label. He loved the business with the uncomplicated devotion of someone who had never needed to be talked into caring about it.

He also loved the internet with an almost frightening intensity. When e-commerce emerged in the late 1990s and he convinced his father to let him build one of the first alcohol delivery sites in the country, the store's revenues began climbing fast. By the time he launched Wine Library TV, annual sales had already passed $10 million and the trajectory was steep. The online operation had changed everything. But the show was something different again. Gary was not interested in the patrician cadences of traditional wine criticism. He showed up on camera in jeans and a Jets jersey, told viewers a Cabernet smelled like "a freshly opened can of Play-Doh," and slammed his fist on the desk when a wine excited him. He had no formal oenology training. He also had 90,000 daily viewers within a couple of years, a number most regional television stations would have envied. The store crossed $60 million in annual revenue. Gary was fielding calls from the Letterman show. He was being profiled in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.