Under the Spell: Divit Cardoza Recounts the Ripening of the Boise Co-op Wine Shop
If you’ve stopped by the Boise Co-op Wine department sometime over the last 30 years, you’ve probably run into Divit Cardoza. He’s got a mop of curly brown hair, now streaked with wisps of gray; a pair of thin, round spectacles and a pierced ear with small gold hoops. He’s definitely not the rotund, mustachioed, monocle-clenching caricature of a wine expert, but he certainly knows his stuff.
In honor of the Boise Co-op Wine Shop’s 30th year, I sat down with my new father-in-law to discuss the Co-op Wine Shop’s humble beginnings and how the Boise wine scene has changed over the last 30 years.
How did you get interested in wine?
I came to wine from food. One day I had an amazing glass of wine that was so profound and so much different than anything I had ever tried. I had no idea wine could taste like this and could be this amazing.
What was that wine?
The one that literally changed my mind about wine and really opened my eyes to what wine could be was a bottle of ’66 La Tâche that I had in ’76 … I tasted it and it was so profound—just the flavors and the aromas and the texture of it, everything was so much beyond anything that I’d ever tried that it was like pixie dust. It was just this magic thing that happened. So you chase that.
Describe the process of starting the Boise Co-op wine department.
I had been a member of the Co-op since it first started. I was working there part time and I told [former President and General Manager Ken Kavanagh], “You know what would be cool? We should sell beer and wine here.” And he thought it was a great idea.
At the time the Co-op was really truly a co-op, where you worked for your membership. Everybody had to volunteer for two hours a week or something, so I said, “Let me do this as my volunteer work.” I decided initially to focus on really, really good values. We had this little $3.99 wall of wine in the back. In a real short amount of time we went from selling $400–$500 worth of wine a week to a year later we’re selling $10,000 worth of wine a week. It grew really fast.
Why do you think it grew so fast?
Because there wasn’t anything like that at the time in Boise. We just kept expanding and getting more square footage and at the same time, the people who came in and bought wine were interested in good food and cheeses. The Co-op started doing more imported cheeses, they started selling meat. So it was a real symbiotic relationship that the store grew out of.
How would you describe Boise’s wine culture back in 1984?
I think it was really exciting. You had a lot of people who didn’t have a lot of knowledge. We’d do tastings and classes constantly, and what I loved about it is the people who came to the classes were really excited to learn about anything. We’d find out about more things and then we’d bring those things to everybody’s attention. When we started, California wines were kind of it. We were the first guys that did Bordeaux futures; we were the first guys that sold Burgundy; we were the first guys that sold Châteauneuf-du-Pape. And now you’re renowned for your Burgundy selection. We do have a large selection of Burgundy. Because French wines in particular age well, we wanted to have something that really showed that we were serious as a wine shop. So we have multiple vintages— there’s probably 10 vintages of Burgundy in the wine shop right now. It’s nice to have some depth there in the cellar.
And you sell a number of those bottles to collectors outside of Idaho?
Yeah, the internet changed our business model tremendously. We were, up until probably 2005, principally just a brick-and-mortar store. You came in and you saw the wine that we had. The Co-op was looking for space; we were packed to the gills in that store and people would complain, particularly around the holidays, “I can’t even get to the wine.” So I brought this plan [to move the wine shop across the parking lot] to the board and they looked at it and did the math and said, “Yeah, let’s do that.”
When was that?
We started work on it in 2006 and we opened in September of 2007. When we opened that first year was hugely successful. We basically got into the computer age and all of the sudden, we had guys calling us from around the country saying, “Do you really have this? Do you really have 10 vintages of this?” … So a lot of the depth that we had in the cellar at that time got cleaned out in a really short amount of time by multiple people. We had over a million dollars in inventory at that time. We have less now; we’ve pared things down. Part of the paring down came about after 2008, when the economy changed.
Only a year after you opened the new wine shop?
Correct. So we had one just ridiculous year. I remember having a meeting with the board where they said, “OK, so you just increased your business 22% in one year, what are you going to do next year?” And I said, “Don’t get your hopes up, kids.” I was really nervous about the business at that time because it didn’t make sense to me that we were paying $1.60 to the Euro for wine and the stock market was just skyrocketing. I just thought, “Something’s going to give here.” And so actually between 2005 and 2006, I cut our purchases of Burgundy by 75%. We still over-bought in 2006. Burgundy sales dropped by 90% worldwide when the ’06 vintage was released, because it was released in ’08. So that was when the tank hit.
In building this wine shop and building this business that we’ve built, it takes a lot of knowledge and it takes a lot of looking and understanding. And I think that when the Co-op, two years ago, joined up with the [National Cooperative Grocers Association], they had no blueprint for what we were doing. There’s 152 co-ops that are part of the NCGA; we do four times what their average store does in the U.S. in wine sales. Nobody’s even close to what we do. So it sort of scared them when they first came. … It took some convincing to get them to understand that a) we know what we’re doing and that b) we move a lot of wine. It’s a good business model.
How do you think the Boise Co-op Wine Shop has changed the wine landscape in Boise?
We were allowed to take a lot of risks early on that enabled us to just try one more thing and introduce people to more and more and more wines. Hopefully our passion for wine—and always trying to find something new and interesting and reasonable for people to try—hopefully that’s broadened the way they look at food and wine as a shared experience.
Boise Co-op | @boisecoop
Divit Cardoza | @divit_cardoza
