Meet the 'Slutty' Winemaker Who's Putting His Phone Number on His Bottles

It's a common enough scenario: You're standing in your local wine shop, perusing the aisles for a bottle to bring to a party, on a date, or to quietly enjoy in the comforts of your own bathtub, but you don't know which one to choose. Your go-to, "second cheapest on the wine list" rule doesn't really apply here. You've already had enough Yellowtail for one lifetime, and as Paul Giamatti says, you're not drinking any fucking merlot. So, what to do?

Enter Brandon Allen, your future wine friend and the self-proclaimed "Director of Important Stuff and Slutty Winemaker" at SLO Down Wines, who thinks you should just pick the one with the label you like best. That's what he does, anyway. And it's that refreshing lack of preciousness and pretension about wine that has helped him grow his enological empire from a single barrel in a backyard in San Luis Obispo (the SLO of SLO Down) into an upstart national juggernaut.

We caught up with Brandon to learn more about SLO Down, broken dreams, and why it's always a good idea for a winemaker to put his phone number on the bottle.

MUNCHIES: So, Brandon, when did you first start making wine? Brandon Allen: I started making wine in college with a friend of mine. We went to school in San Luis Obispo, and he snuck onto a wine tasting trip, and he came back and was like, "Man, we should make wine! I just met all these winemakers, and it's not that hard. We should just make a barrel of wine." So I thought, Shit, why not? We could impress girls and get some free booze? Yeah, let's do it.

When was that? I guess it was 2005 when we made our first batch. And at the time, I didn't know anything about wine, but I thought it was the best thing ever made. Because I'd spent eight months working on this wine with my buddies and having so much fun, and there it was! I mean, looking back on it, I'm sure the wine was total shit, but it was real, you know? Having that tangible thing was really cool.

And so how did SLO Down Wines come about? So, that first year, we made one barrel of wine. The second year, we made two. The third, we made three. And this is when we were still in college, so we'd make this wine and handwrite these labels with a little story about the wine and our phone number on it. And pretty soon, people at school were drinking the wine and they'd call us for more when they ran out, and we'd drive it over to them. And if we were too drunk to drive, we'd bike it over—like over to the dorms or whatever and sell it to them for five bucks. There was definitely no business plan or anything —we were just trying to break even, really—but I guess, legally speaking, SLO Down started in 2008, because that's when I actually went out and got licensed and stuff. And we ended up with 93 cases that year of what we call Sexual Chocolate.

Right, which is the red blend with the handwritten label and the phone number on it. Exactly, yeah. And we made that just by itself every year until 2012, when we introduced Broken Dreams, which is our chardonnay, and Stand Out, which is the Bordeaux-style blend.

Where do the names come from? Sexual Chocolate comes from early on when we were naming different barrels to keep the wines separate from each other. One night I got drunk and named one of the barrels Sexual Chocolate, because I thought it tasted like sexual chocolate.

Of course. And what about the other ones? Well, Broken Dreams comes from a shitty story, actually, which is that I started the company with the buddy from college who I started making wine with, and we kinda had a bad falling out.

Oh. That sucks. Yeah, so when that happened, all broken-hearted, I changed the outgoing message for that phone number to be like, "Hi, you've reached SLO Down Wines, the home of Sexual Chocolate and broken dreams" because that's how I was feeling. But I actually got a call from a wine shop owner in LA saying, "Hey, you know, we love Sexual Chocolate, why don't you send us a case of Broken Dreams?" And we'd been working on the chardonnay already, but we didn't have a name for it or anything, so I just thought, "Fuck it, they say the first case is the hardest to sell, so here's a case of Broken Dreams, dude." And for Stand Out—it's so funny when you talk about these things—it's really just that we wanted the wine to stand out, so we called it Stand Out. I wish it was a better story.

It makes sense. It's kind of like anti-branding. Well, it's just that I think people—the people who I make wine for, anyway: my friends, myself, the people I want to impress—they want something that's real. They want something where they feel like there's somebody behind the product. At least I do.

So, do you think your experience as a consumer informs your role as a winemaker? Absolutely. And I think the biggest way, actually, is that I'm a total packaging whore. Like, if I see a label that I think is cool, I'll usually buy the bottle if it's not too expensive, just because I like the packaging. People say that's a trap or bullshit or whatever, but I don't think so at all. Because I'm trying to make a statement with our wines, and if you go into a wine shop, you'll see that our bottles look different than anything else on the shelf. And that's purposeful. It's all a part of a package.

That's interesting, because you hear a lot of winemakers talking about terroir or scores or pursuing a bunch of gold medals, but you're maybe doing something else. To me, everything comes back to wanting to make wine for my friends. It's not necessarily about scores or anything like that—though, don't get me wrong, I'd take them—but my favorite compliment is always: "I don't like wine, but I like this wine." That's an awesome feeling, because it feels like I connected with someone. Because I used to be that guy, you know? I thought wine was super-pretentious and elitist, but it doesn't have to be. So when I get that opportunity to change someone's mind, that's really cool to me. Because I'm not trying to collect scores, I'm trying to collect friends—like, if I could meet everybody on the face of the Earth, I would.

You seem to be conducting something of a social experiment by leaving your actual phone number on the Sexual Chocolate label. It's like you're literally sending out messages in a bottle. Honestly, I get between five and ten phone calls a day on that phone.

Really? Every day, yeah.

And do you pick it up? Yeah, I try to! Unless I'm in the shower or something, then I won't answer—but most of the time I do. I just love talking to people. Actually, I was just talking to someone from Chicago five minutes before I started talking to you—it's really random. A lot of times it's groups of women—like groups of three or more women from the ages of 35 to 50 is like the predominant demographic. But it's really people from all over the country, who are just free-spirited people getting loose, you know? And I love it. Honestly, I get as much out of it as they do. Probably more. I mean, that's why I got into this whole thing in the first place.

Thanks for speaking with me, Brandon.