A Family of Entrepreneurs

Wine passes through many hands (as mandated by the United State government) as it makes its way from the winery to your table. Luckily, the importer is in a unique position to guide where the wine goes as it passes down the global supply chain. So we try to choose partners that have our same beliefs. Our wineries have incredible stories and we celebrate them at length on our new website, but I want you to know a little about the other incredible partners we work with. Over the next few blogs, I will tell you about one such set of partners: our distributors. Each one has a unique story and all are owned by brave entrepreneurs. Today I want to celebrate the first distributor that took a chance on Elemental Importers’ wine.

American Northwest, Seattle, WA: Owned and operated by Oleg Fedechkin, his wife Rina, and son Anton. Emigrating from Russia when Anton was just a child, the Fedechkin family took many twists and turns before finally settling in Seattle. Along their journey they lived many years in Spain. There they grew a love and passion for Spanish wines and culture. They brought this knowledge and passion to Seattle where with no real connections in the community and limited English skills, this brave family began importing and self distributing their beloved Spanish wine. Over the years their company has grown to be a respected supplier of wine, beer and sake from across the United State and the world. Spanish wines? Of course. But their global collection spans from California to Argentina to Italy to Israel and to Japan.

The Joy of Doing Good Business

Ryan and I just launched a new website, and in the process we rewrote our "About Us" section. This was a lot harder to write than I thought it would be because it forced us to narrow in on what we valued and why we do what we do. It is easy to be passionate about many different things in this business (the wine! the food! the travel!), but we wanted to get at the core of it all. Of course we love wine. But what else?

We sat down around our kitchen table to discuss. After kicking around some ideas, we gravitated to one common theme: doing business the right way. Recently we've all seen how businesses driven by greed can harm our environment, their business partners, and their own customers. Frankly, because of their poor examples, business hasn’t been looking so hot. However, Ryan and I love entrepreneurship. How do we reconcile this? We realized that our passion comes from working with and supporting strong, successful, family-owned businesses that are a blessing to their communities. Our greatest joy is in visiting our wineries and seeing firsthand how they treat the environment with respect and bring honorable employment to their neighbors – while making great profits. And their example encourages us to do the same. We believe that by doing business right, entrepreneurs can and do change the world for the better.

So this is our promise (and our passion) as written in our “About Us”.

Being a family business, they only import wines from family-owned wineries. Ashley and Ryan personally visit each and every producer to guarantee that they respect and care for their workers and for their land with sustainable, often organic, environmental practices. They then work hard to instill these same values throughout their entire global supply chain.

P.S. Here is a shout out to all those large corporations that are doing business right. They do exist, and our world is better because of them. Let’s raise a glass to business with ethics!