Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/807384
april 2017 / the tasting panel / 55 J ust outside the glitzy confines of Downtown Dallas, tucked into an indus- trial warehouse district, lies an expan- sive white facade of a more than 100,000-plus- square-foot building. It doesn't really offer much in the way of curb appeal. But as they say, never judge a book by its cover. What's inside this basic commercial-warehouse veneer is a clear-cut story of entrepreneurship leveraging creativity and resourcefulness to pioneer a more efficient way of bringing wine and spirits to the market, which has been further demonstrated with the recent launches of Calamity Gin and Knockmore Irish Whiskey. CEO Sarvesh Sharma, COO John Fortman and President Mike Howard stand together as a cohesive team with their new business platform for wine and spirits. Just outside the glitzy confines of Dallas's Downtown, tucked into an industrial warehouse district, Southwest Spirits & Wine occupies 100,000 feet of a 150,000-square- foot building. In its early beginnings, Southwest Spirits & Wine was a food and beverage plant producing sauces and juice -based drinks. Acquiring it in 2013, CEO Sarvesh Sharma and his partners set about analyzing the existing company's assets to set strategy for a new direction. If you had asked him then if he had intended to be running a spirits company within a year, he would have laughed you out of the room. But then something happened. Sharma discovered that the former food plant had a dormant distillery and winery license. And an idea began to take shape.