Craig Collins
Co-Founder
Jack Mason
Co-Founder
Soncy Urso
Director of Sales
Wine is supposed to be fun, and the business surrounding it should be enjoyable too. When we entered the industry, hospitality and service were foundational. Selling wine meant showing up, listening, sharing knowledge, solving problems and building relationships. Somewhere along the way, too much of the business became impersonal and transactional. Legacy distributors have consolidated, wobbled or disappeared outright. Wineries have been left searching for someone who will actually pick up the phone. Buyers have been handed more complexity and less service. Salespeople have been buried under quotas with little time left for relationships.
We know there is a better way. Caliche was created to bring hospitality, service and genuine partnership back to wine distribution, for the people who make the wine, the people who sell it and the people who put it on their tables and shelves. Because the best relationships should feel less like transactions and more like doing business with people you would happily open another bottle with.
Between us, we have spent decades working across every side of the wine business: restaurants, wineries, importers, boutique distributors and large legacy companies. We first met in 2012 and spent the next decade working alongside one another, as supplier, importer and distributor, often on opposite sides of the same deals. We kept noticing the same thing: when one of us said we would do something, we did it. That's rarer in this business than it should be.
We also opened a few bottles along the way. We earned our Master Sommelier pins in 2011 and 2015, but Caliche is built on much more than what appears after our names. It is built on years spent working with buyers, walking restaurant floors, leading sales teams, growing brands, managing distributors and creating lasting relationships throughout Texas and beyond.
A distributor should do more than handle logistics. It should be a winery's voice, advocate and trusted partner in the market, not a warehouse with a sales team bolted on. For our winery partners, that means transparent communication, honest conversations and thoughtful decisions about where a brand belongs, how it should grow and what long-term success should look like. It means treating every bottle as someone else's hard work, reputation and livelihood.
For our restaurant and retail partners, it means attentive service, genuine hospitality and wines that earn their place on a list or shelf. We want to understand what makes each program distinctive, solve problems instead of creating them and be easy to do business with. No anonymous pitches. No transactional mentality. No pressure to buy something simply because it needs to move. Just thoughtful wines, honest conversations and people who answer the phone.
Our portfolio has no rules about region, grape or price point. A $10 bottle must overdeliver at $10, and a $1,000 bottle must earn every cent of it.
We care about quality, character, authenticity and the people behind the bottle. Life is too short to build a business around wines we don't believe in or people we don't enjoy working with. We take wine seriously. We just refuse to take ourselves too seriously while we do it.
Caliche is a limestone-rich layer running through the soil beneath Texas. The name connects us to our Texas roots while reflecting wine's own relationship with soil, place and identity.
It is a fitting name for a company being built deliberately, independently and from the ground up. We're here to make wine in Texas personal again. Great wine. Good people. No pretense. Let's open something great.
