Club Newsletter - March 2026
- Gary Parker
- 17 hours ago
- 5 min read
Here are some excerpts from an interview I had from Canvas Rebel Magazine. Thought you might like to get to know me and how we got here a little better. This is a two part Series:
MEET GARY PARKER
Canvas Rebel: Gary, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Gary Parker: I was in the business of selling wine direct to consumers through in home wine tastings and education. It was a 100% commission job. I sold a lot of wine to my customers, who told me they would buy even more if they had a place to store the wine properly. I researched wine storage facilities in San Diego and found there were none whatsoever. At the time (1983) here were two places in Los Angeles area that stored wine professionally. Nobody had basements in our city, so I felt there was a strong need for the concerned wine collector.
I rented a small suite in an industrial area in Sorrento Valley, built 33 wine lockers and provided a cooling unit for the storage space to check out the market. I was employed at a fine dining restaurant as Maître ‘d and wine steward and spent my evenings in the restaurant and my days at the storage facility waiting for a customer to call.
We got no storage inquiries for the first eighty days we were open, and I was wondering if I made an error in my assumptions, about the needs for wine storage in San Diego. Then, a person called and moved in the next week, my first customer! Within forty-five days, the other 32 lockers were filled, and I had a waiting list for clients. I rented an annex facility and ended up with over one hundred renters within six months.
One of my locker renters was a developer and was developing the building I am in now. We struck a deal where I would be the anchor tenant, and I could design the 5,000 square foot space to my specifications. I had been working restaurants while going to college, and that and the wine industry were (and still are) my passions.
So, we designed the restaurant, the wine retail space, and created and built the first of its kind three level wine storage facility within the warehouse area of the building. We added refrigeration units to cool the warehouse to the proper temperature and humidity.
I chose French food for our restaurant, because I love it and was working in two French restaurants for about eight years.
We now have 219 lockers which are nearly fully occupied with very little turnover.
The WineSellar & Brasserie was the first business in the Nation that featured a fine dining restaurant, retail wines sales, and a wine storage facility.
Canvas Rebel: Gary, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Gary Parker: I was studying architecture at San Diego State College when one of my professors told me to get a job in the industry or transfer to a Cal Poly school. I had just moved here from Los Angeles (1973) and did not want to leave this fabulous city, so I got a job doing graphic illustration work for a mid-sized company. That was very part-time, so I found myself supplementing my income working every position I could at French Restaurant in Solana Beach, Mon Ami.
With my first sip of a great wine, I was hooked. I looked into finding everything I could about wine (this was pre-internet) and decided I was going to dedicate my life to wine and food endeavors. I fantasized about owning my own restaurant and booking myself to play jazz in it. I was studying the saxophone at the time, but only play sporadically anymore.
So now, we are in our 38th year of business and have built a loyal following of those who live and love wine and fine dining.
We have special wine dinners every month, special wine tastings weekly, and provide lunch and dinner service to the area of Sorrento Mesa.
One of the things I am most proud of: we have four different levels of wine of the month club memberships, with 400-500 subscribers. We provide educational tasting notes for each wine, recipes, an epicurean related newsletter, and a free tasting of the wines each month in our restaurant. All the wines in each level of the wine club are sold below their suggested retail prices and come from all over the world’s many wine growing regions. We have people who signed up for the wine club when we started in 1999 who are still in the club today, twenty-seven years later!
Canvas Rebel: Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Gary Parker: In 1988, I was committing to move in to the yet to be built building we still occupy today. I needed $120,000 to assist with the building and furnishing the restaurant, to include outfitting a new kitchen and inventory for the wine shop. I had never raised money before. Again, pre internet days, there was little available reference material on how to go about attracting investors to put their money in my dream.
I collected a few different prospectus I could find designed for larger companies and used those as a general outline for an investment package. I put in working projections based on certain amount of diners coming in daily, the food cost, beverage costs, labor, rent, utilities and potential rental income from the wine storage lockers; everything I could imagine as cost factors and sided that up against the projected revenue stream.
The investment package was about 20 pages long. I put a bit of romance into as well, with photos of other restaurants and wine bars and retail wine shops.
I had all the money raised in three months.
Canvas Rebel: Do you have multiple revenue streams – if so, can you talk to us about those streams and how your developed them?
Gary Parker: Having multiple revenue sources at The WineSellar & Brasserie has been the key to our long term existence,
In the beginning, we had a full service wine shop, a French restaurant serving lunch only, and a wine storage facility for private collectors to house their wine correctly, safely.
We later opened The Brasserie Restaurant to serve dinner as well as lunch, and introduced winemaker dinners and specialized themed wine tasting events.
In 1999, we began selling wines through an online Internet wine auction which increased our wine sales $500,000 annually.
In 2000, we began our three separate levels of wine of the month wine clubs, still going strong today with hundreds of members.
In 2001, we began conducting wine tours for small groups (16 people). We now conduct two of these tours every year, and have been to South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania, France, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Greece, Sicily, Portugal, and this year Croatia.
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