Top 100 Retailer: Stop and Smell the Rosé at DCanter
Editor’s Note: We’re recognizing our Top 100 Retailers in the beverage alcohol retail industry from the past year, including DCanter in Washington, DC, and our 2025 Retailer of the Year, Garfield’s Beverage.
During a time when wine sales are less than desirable, DCanter wine boutique has found success through personalized experiences.
Located along Washington, DC’s oldest commercial corridor, this store offers curated wine services to help customers find their individual taste and budget preferences — ultimately helping those who don’t typically enjoy wine to find a brand that suits them.
For Michael Warner, co-founder and chief operating officer, it’s all about building upon personal experiences for the customers to find their perfect wine.
“Wine is very much an experiential good,” he says. “When you talk to customers and ask them about their favorite bottle of wine, they always talk about the meal they were having, the people they were with or the beautiful sunset. And then they say the wine was just red, so we really try to capture and expand upon that experience.”
Wine-derful Growth
Part of DCanter’s success can be attributed to its one-of-a-kind wine shopping and delivery service called Concierge by DCanter. This service provides clients with a personal wine expert who hand-selects wines based on their individual taste and budget preferences, with delivery available throughout Washington, DC and northern Virginia.
“We can tailor wine recommendations for our customers based on data and feedback that they share with us on each wine product they purchase via our proprietary software,” Warner says. “We’re the only retailer in our immediate market that offers a personalized wine shopping combined with highly reliable delivery services.”
According to Warner, DCanter has experienced results well above the industry averages. While the off-premise industry shrank in 2024, DCanter’s top line revenue grew by 4%.
“Meanwhile, we operated more efficiently by decreasing our full-time staff slightly through attrition, and we decreased the company’s debt load by approximately 15%,” he says.
The wine store’s success has even garnered the attention of a variety of media outlets, not only making Beverage Dynamics’ Top 100 Retailers list, but also the Washington City Paper’s DC’s Best New Retailer in 2014, the 2017 Best Wine Shop in the Mid-Atlantic by VinePair and many others.
Continued Store upgrades
Improvements are crucial to helping a business flourish, and Warner explains that he’s always looking to make enhancements to the store. Throughout 2024, DCanter made improvements in efforts that began in 2023 as an adjustment to post-Covid normalization, including:
Transitioning the Concierge by DCanter operational software to a more advanced hosting environment on AWS.
Adopting more sophisticated modeling methodology to predict product demand from consumers. Throughout the past year, these refinements make the store’s budgets for core recurring products accurate within 3% of actual purchasing by customers.
Expanding their direct importing program with an additional three European wineries. Fifty percent of DCanter’s best-selling products now come from this program.
Warner also mentions that the wine boutique has evolved its education events programming throughout the year to include new formats, such as portfolio tastings on niche interests.
“We also created multi-part wine educational programs that extend over multiple weeks, which encourages repeat purchases from customers,” he says.
Building on DCanter’s continued success, Warner states that they are currently searching for property to open a second location.
Krystina Skibo is the Trade Managing Editor at Beverage Dynamics. Reach her at kskibo@epgacceleration.com. Read her recent piece, Liquor Stores Make Room for Cannabis and CBD Beverages.
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