In short
The episode explores how emerging beverage brands build trust and community by spotlighting overlooked origins—Other Wine’s “underrepresented regions” strategy and Sorate’s calm, ritual-based Japanese matcha in New York.
Guests
- Jack Blumson and Gleb Petrenko, co-founders of Other Wine (wine importer/brand). Background: started with casual wine curiosity and frustration with confusing, pomp-driven wine marketing; both became inspired by a trip to Georgia (ancient cave cellars, inclusive wine culture; drinking from horns, feasts).
Key claims
build a recognizable wine brand so people trust “other” regions, not just France/Spain/Italy; storytelling and consistent design language; Gen Z wine interest is driven by disposable income and experiences.
Notable examples
Georgian cave cellars; wine fairs; meet-the-winemaker events (e.g., Uruguay winemaker in London); limited “drop” wines for D2C.
- Sylvia Mellor, founder/creative director of Sorate (Japanese matcha tea company). Background: Italian; worked in fashion/advertising; launched after a Japan trip; mentored by an Omotesenke tea master.
Key claims
Sorate blends Italian and Japanese identity; tea rituals create “two minutes of tranquility” in busy NYC; started online in 2019, expanded to Soho in 2023 and a second location in Sept 2025.
Notable examples
matcha tiramisu paste; panettone during holidays; tatami-style formal teahouse project.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring Other Wine
0:45 to 2:18
Discussion about Other Wine and its focus on underrepresented wine regions.
“On today's episode, we're taking a beverage-fuelled journey around the world.”
The Eureka Moment
2:18 to 4:06
Co-founders share the journey from casual wine lovers to business owners.
“into a whole new venture in the wine industry.”
Challenges in Wine Branding
4:06 to 5:04
The importance of branding and the challenges faced in the wine industry.
“That was definitely a moment where we kind of thought there's more to this than just an idea.”
Consumer Engagement and Trends
5:04 to 6:34
Insights on changing consumer habits and the importance of storytelling in wine.
“Actually I hope my former employers don't listen to this.”
Adapting to Market Changes
6:34 to 8:10
Discussion on the dynamic nature of business planning and market adaptation.
Sales Strategies and Future Vision
8:10 to 14:02
Exploration of sales strategies and future ambitions for Other Wine.
“I must admit, much of my Georgian wine knowledge is informed by that Drops of God.”
Adapting Wine Brand Strategies
14:02 to 14:46
Learn how the business adapts its wine offerings to market demands.
“If someone comes in and says, look, everything you've got planned for the next six months isn't going to work, and they have a really valid reason and we talk it through, then we might well change.”
Sales Channels and Product Launches
14:47 to 16:04
Explore the diverse sales channels and upcoming product launches in the wine sector.
Building a Wine Community
16:05 to 17:54
Understand the importance of community events and customer feedback in wine sales.
“You start to get that recognition really exciting and a kind of validation of what you're doing.”
Vision for the Future of Wine
17:55 to 18:55
Discover the ambition to promote a broader range of wines and winemakers.
“I think almost, this is going to sound horrible, but the journey of it is what I'm excited about.”
Show all 15 chapters
Trust in Wine Branding
18:56 to 19:50
Learn how trust influences consumer choices in wine brands versus regions.
“So much of that comes in the trust in the brand.”
Cultural Inspirations Behind Sorate
20:43 to 22:28
Explore the inspirations from Italian and Japanese cultures in tea offerings.
“blending Italian and Japanese influences, and creating calm in an ever-hectic city.”
From Online Sales to Physical Locations
22:29 to 24:28
Understand the transition from an online platform to brick-and-mortar locations for Sorate.
“And I saw that there was none specifically like open to the public that you can go in and out every day.”
Creating Tranquility in a Fast-Paced City
24:29 to 26:00
Learn how Sorate aims to provide a calming experience in New York City.
“So together we opened the first Sorate location, which is in Soho.”
Future Expansion Plans for Sorate
26:01 to 27:35
Discover Sylvia's vision for expanding Sorate and creating traditional tea experiences.
“So we're a customer of Sorate that comes inside the stores and tell us that they, oh I'm glad to be here I'm very relaxed when I come here I'm relaxed I feel like I made the point.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01Jack Blumsom:In April, Monocle hosts the Entrepreneurs Live in Shanghai, a one-day conference bringing together founders, investors and innovators shaping businesses across China and the wider region. Join us there and visit monocle.com slash conference for more.
0:38Jack Blumsom:Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Charge your glasses. On today's episode, we're taking a beverage-fuelled journey around the world. First, we'll meet the co-founders of a wine company that's shining a light on regions less explored.
1:00Silvia Mella:Over there, there's not the same pomp or weirdness around wine. They're drinking wine out of horns, feasts and stuff, and it's just very inclusive.
1:09Jack Blumsom:And later, we'll hear from the Italian founder of a New York-based Japanese tea company.
1:15Gleb Petrenko:The name itself, it sounds Japanese, but it's actually from Venice. In fact, Sorate is an Italian name, and it means calm down or relax.
1:24Jack Blumsom:This is The Entrepreneurs, with me, Tom Edwards.
1:36Jack Blumsom:You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Jack Blumson and Gleb Petrenko are the co-founders of Other Wine, a wine importer and brand championing bottles from underrepresented and often overlooked regions. From Moldova and Uruguay to Turkey, Slovenia and beyond, Other offers an alternative to the usual French, Spanish and Italian options. What started as a shared curiosity, and by their own admission a fairly hazy understanding of winemaking, turned into something much bigger after a trip to Georgia. Home to the world's oldest winemaking traditions, it opened their eyes to a very different culture around wine and led to the eureka moment of what would become the other wine business.
2:17Jack Blumsom:Jack and Gleb stopped by Midori House to discuss turning her side hustle and casual tastings into a whole new venture in the wine industry. Gleb began proceedings.
2:28Silvia Mella:we both loved wine we didn't know much about it but we loved it in a kind of like a young 20 year
2:34Jack Blumsom:old drinking loads of wine way um boxes bottles whatever you get your hands on bottles it's
2:39Silvia Mella:interesting actually so not boxes because we thought that was cheap but then we would still buy four pound bottles of wine we had a thing where we thought that if you had the that gold netting on the wine that meant that it was a really good wine yeah i remember you telling me that how deep the thing is at the bottom yeah the divot the divot that meant it was good or bad so we had the passion was there in the background knowledge wasn't the knowledge wasn't and it was also kind of just misplaced i think i think we were leaning on the gold netting and the picture of the chateau and the divot because we didn't feel like it was a very accessible thing to get into which is why when we visited georgia together kind of in search of wine not necessarily to start a business but just in search of that my parents are ukrainian and they grew up in the soviet union talking about how amazing georgian wine was where wine was invented and over there there's not the same like pomp or weirdness around wine they're kind of well it's still weird they're drinking wine out of horns feasts and stuff and it's just like very inclusive in fun and deeply social isn't
3:36Jack Blumsom:it so that's interesting so you went there it was just to kind of scratch an itch it wasn't with an eye on potentially getting into the wine importing game or anything like that it was just
3:46Silvia Mella:no it was just went to the world cup um we knew we'd try and wine out there we did for sure we've told this story before pretending we didn't even know we'd try wine out there but we didn't know
3:55Jack Blumsom:but no it wasn't with an iron starting a business no so tell me when does that moment happen is it just that you i don't know was it was it kind of did the discussion begin at the bottom of a bottle of wine kind of story uh jack tell me about this if there was indeed a single eureka moment yeah
4:11Silvia Mella:i think there were probably a cluster of small small moments that we can point to firstly you're sounding great glib the i think yes we had this as glib said we had this interest and which kind of rolled into a bit of a shared frustration with wine where prior to the georgia trip there was definitely a kind of mini eureka moment in georgia when we were supposed to be spending a little bit of time in also the majority of the time in tbilisi we ended up spending way more time than expected in the east of georgia which is where the main winemaking region is and we were kind of wandering around these ancient wine cellars built into the sides of caves thousands of years old and that's kind of where we couldn't really believe what we'd stumbled across.
4:51Silvia Mella:That was definitely a moment where we kind of thought there's more to this than just an idea. When we got back to the UK we were really excited by just Georgian wine and we started taking afternoons off work to go to wine fairs and industry tastings. Bravo! Bravo! Actually I hope my former employers don't listen to this.
5:08Jack Blumsom:Key word there, former. Keep going, my friend, that's fine
5:12Silvia Mella:And at these wine fairs we would stumble across, yes, Georgian wine but also Lebanese and Slovakian and all of these other regions and we kind of got excited by the fact that there are these other places out there which is of course why we're called Other
5:24Jack Blumsom:So then you start to think maybe we've got something that we can do here What was it that prompted you to take Other in the specific direction it goes in? Because it's a really interesting idea it's not just about foregrounding these stories that need a bit more telling, Gleb but you also then think about what's the look of this going to be? And this idea of not just being an importer, but you said at the start, you know, being a brand. 100%. Was that because that was what you guys were doing before or you just wanted to bring that kind of uniformity or that sense of ownership to it? Tell me about that.
5:56Silvia Mella:I think the underrepresented regions thing is like really the core of the business. It's going to sound wanky, but it's like it's almost like a vehicle for the main driver, which is building a wine brand because we're all familiar with that moment. You go to a wine shop and you're kind of like baffled about all the things you're looking at, 100 different chateaus. And we feel like it's deliberately confusing at times. It's made in a way to confuse you and just kind of force you into a kind of price battle and just pick the nicest chateau or whatever. Like rarely see the same thing twice. And actually the industry is set up around discovery and around almost like the merchant layer.
6:35Silvia Mella:so everyone knows Laithwaites and Majestic and all those people
6:38Jack Blumsom:For our global listeners those are the kind of monster market destroying players here in the UK We're not destroying sorry slightly pejorative They're the big players here in the UK We might want to work
6:49Silvia Mella:with them at some point so not destroying them Let me tell them again
6:51Jack Blumsom:They're a couple of the big players here in the UK And they're great
6:54Silvia Mella:and we love them But you rarely think about a brand as the wine itself and if you do then it's shit wine It's like the really really bad stuff and they have imported mass mass bottles of it but you never like you never think this is a mid-premium nice wine i'm happy to go back to again again because like it's reliable and it's really good quality and i engage with it like i feel something when i drink that wine other than drunk i feel like connecting with a brand and i think for us that was a second eureka moment an ongoing eureka moment where it feels like it's not just about importing wine from underrepresented regions it's about building a brand for people to engage with and resonate with and take to a friend's house and be proud that you've bought it and know more about the winemaker not just have a jumble of letters you don't understand on the front and know about who made it and do they have a dog well i
7:47Jack Blumsom:was going to ask you about this because if you think of this idea of like the fascination with provenance and the craft that goes into an object or a product or a monocle this is a kind of foundational value to how we talk about everything um it's kind of like the you guys are we're ahead to the curve in saying, look, people want to drink wine. They want to know the provenance. They want to know this maker. They maybe want to see them. They want to hear from them. They want to see those places. You can talk about Georgia. I must admit, much of my Georgian wine knowledge is informed by that Drops of God.
8:14Jack Blumsom:Do you watch that Drops of God programme?
8:15Silvia Mella:I started watching it the other day. Oh, okay. Oh, it's inside subtitles on, didn't it?
8:19Jack Blumsom:It's, well, and it's like multi-multilingual, but it's a hugely, it's all about Georgia. It's all about Georgia. So what are those, the things, you know, they bury the things in the quiveries if you know I think persist with it so now I feel like I'm an expert and I was going to ask you about they want to see is this coming from a quivery or is it you butchered that I do this is the problem when people know what they're talking about but it's this idea of unlocking that problem that story but you guys is that a thing storytelling I kind of come back to this is that another shared passion of yours or yeah
8:57Silvia Mella:it's a big it's kind of central tenets to the overall brand for sure I think connecting all the bottles and the regions together with the same design language is part of it and so we work with artists based in the UK and Lisbon to create kind of amazing designs but equally important for sure is the the way we tell the stories of the vineyards I think a big part of that is because the kind of loud wacky punk brand like style of where people maybe try to oversimplify wine by saying let's make wine fun and reduce all the snobbery and pomp and whatever which we tried we tried to do that well yeah when we first started we thought that was going to be the kind of key to unlocking it but what we found is that that's actually kind of really reductive because as you pointed out it is a kind of lovingly handcrafted product and that should be celebrated and the stories of those people you know we want to share it's just really really interesting it's so difficult to make wine and that's something i think it's a really easy way out to just be like yeah like you said the punky crazy thing where it's just wine man and we did i think we had a thing where we said like it's just grape juice at some point ages ago but it it is super reductive and the whole balance of what we're trying to do is to build a brand you're happy to come back to because the kind of like i said the industry's set up around discovery so people feel like if you drink the same wine twice you've done it wrong or something it's about constantly finding new things that you've not heard of and that when you take it to dinner party they wouldn't have heard of it either so we have to try and build a brand where you are happy to buy it again and enjoy it again but still appreciates the craft and the discovery and the fact that growing grapes is long and like really difficult and a bad patch of weather can ruin your
10:37Jack Blumsom:harvest well let's yeah exactly let's talk about a couple of the challenges and i guess one is and we've had wine producers you know california and it's like oh yeah no vintages in 24 or whichever the year was and it's like heartbreaking for the obviously because the planet is burning before our eyes, but also for these amazing producers who are completely at the mercy of the environment. So there's that. But I guess there are other sectorial challenges. People say, oh, well, you know, Gen Z don't drink wine anymore, so you're doing this at the wrong time, Jack. What's the rejoinder? What's the rebuttal to that and to some of these other challenges?
11:08Silvia Mella:So there was a bit of a scare, an industry scare a few years ago about that. I personally think that's overblown. So I think the notion that Gen Z weren't drinking or participating in alcohol and wine at all was largely down to the fact that it was more of a financial thing. So loads of reports came out last year, which I'll share with you to put in the show notes because it was really interesting. And now that Gen Z, lots of Gen Z have been in the workforce for a few years, there's leftover money at the end of every month. And that is going on to experiences, travel, and eating out at restaurants and spending a little bit more on wine.
11:40Jack Blumsom:Is it that they've got the money or is it that the work is driving them to drink? We can't answer that definitively. It could be a little from column A and column B. Definitely a bit of both. And that's an opportunity for you guys, presumably, once this group then start to look at this market and crucially want to be validated by experiences. That's exactly where you're...
11:58Silvia Mella:I thought you were going to say work driving people to drink is an opportunity.
12:03Jack Blumsom:I mean, that was kind of, it was couched in those terms. But no, but that's right, right? I mean, you're doing the kind, you're offering that kind of community that those new drinkers want to be a part of, presumably.
12:15Silvia Mella:Yeah, because I think that their buying habits are different to previous generations. I think the first thing is that there is this thing around conscious consumption, around wanting to know, as we said, the story behind what's in the bottle, knowing that it's good quality. It's not just drinking the cheapest thing for the sake of it to get drunk as quickly as possible, which is what, as Glevin and I are millennials, we did growing up.
12:37Jack Blumsom:That's been happening for, I can't even remember what I am, Gen X or something, I don't know.
12:41Silvia Mella:Yeah, it's been going on.
12:42Jack Blumsom:That discipline has always played its heart, of course.
12:45Silvia Mella:But then I think the other thing is, as there always is, I think, I guess with any industry, I want to kind of go against what came before you. And so what your parents drink is, you know, good, ordinary kind of claret from Bordeaux. It's interesting, exciting, and different to try something from Morocco, for example.
Read the full transcript
13:03Jack Blumsom:Tell me about then, bigger picture, you're doing this, as we said, you know, you started as a passion play, now it's still your passion, clearly, but it's business. what's your take how's the industry looking and crucially i suppose what's the plan you know whether that's in terms of timelines or growth ambitions or confidence in the market give me a little sense of yeah i mean we feel pretty confident in the market i think in terms of
13:29Silvia Mella:the plan investors aren't going to be happy about this but the plan changes uh they love that every week they love it i think yes it's often you get asked at a point in time what is the plan and And depending on who's asking, you have to provide a response that sounds confident. But actually, if I'm honest, the plan changes quite a lot. And it's not, I haven't found what we've done to be made up of one plan we had at the start, and then it's just, we've just been executing on it. It's a thousand plans. Sometimes it feels like a day. I almost think that's like one of our, if we have any strengths, that's probably one of our strengths is that we do just constantly adapt.
14:05Silvia Mella:If someone comes in and says, look, everything you've got planned for the next six months isn't going to work, and they have a really valid reason and we talk it through, then we might well change. But for sure, the plan is to build a brand, expand the range and make it so that you come and you try Jimmy Jimmer from Moldova. I'm just going to start plugging all the wine names now. Or Doldora from Moldova. Or Levantana from Uruguay. Or Balido from Uruguay. And these things look beautiful, by the way.
14:31Jack Blumsom:It's an audio medium, so this is a tricky moment. But they look, it's like a family of wines. They're identifiably the same, but they're definitely different and there's some real punch and confidence and intrigue in the way that they're exactly presented yeah just on that point what's the sales how does that work are you kind of d to c you want to be in places you've got partnerships just give us a quick sense of how
14:54Silvia Mella:you're actually moving these products out to the market yeah it's a mix so we we go through well yeah it is which is full-blown mix to be honest we're in various independent shops grocers and delis off trade then we're in quite a few restaurants and wine bars if there's a cool wine bar near you probably we're in there hopefully we're in there if not let us know and then also d2c yeah and then this summer we're going to be launching this is an exclusive oh love this you ready for this well it turns what it is but uh a limited edition wine because we've got so many contacts vineyards that are too small for us to work with and just produce amazing small parcels of wine and we're going to start bringing them over as kind of like one-offs limited edition type of wines and that would be just d2c and almost like a kind of when a fashion brand does a kind of a drop for trainers or whatever it's like season drop don't drop the don't drop the
15:45Jack Blumsom:wine terrible ways just quickly on that kind of community building thing it's really important as you said and you're it must be exciting to begin to get feedback that you said about people coming to a dinner party, not just saying like, oh, I've brought this one. It's a real favourite of mine. But that other moment where the other diners say, oh, yes, I've been meaning to try that or something. You start to get that recognition really exciting and a kind of validation of what you're doing. Talk to me about community. Is that about events, clubs? I know you have these kind of more sort of clubby elements as well in the mix.
16:17Jack Blumsom:But what's the vision for how you consolidate that community who are clearly hungry, sorry, they're thirsty to be a part of it?
16:26Silvia Mella:So the majority of what we do around community stuff is in-person events. Some of that is kind of commercially driven. So it might be a supper club or an event that we can kind of maybe sell wine, buy the glass at. And it's kind of a little bit more low key, but still just a fun opportunity to get our community of customers together. Others really kind of lean hard into what we're really passionate about, which is around the storytelling. So we do kind of meet the winemaker evenings. We had one a few weeks ago where Pia, who's the winemaker from Uruguay, was in London. and we hired out a wine bar and got 40, 50 people together for that, which was fun.
16:58Silvia Mella:We just started a book club, so that's got absolutely no bearing at all on the commercial direction of the business, but it's just quite a fun thing to do, and we found that that was massively oversubscribed. I think we were talking about, on the morning that we launched it, how many people, how many sign-ups we think we'd actually get, who actually cares about a book club from a wine brand, and I think we were kind of thinking we'd get maybe 20 or 30 people, and we got nearly 100 in the first day, so we're going to have to find a bigger venue to host. That's pretty good.
17:26Jack Blumsom:People like reading and they like drinking. Yeah, exactly. Who knew? Best of both. And just quickly, maybe just a final kind of ambition. Deb, I'll start with you. Is it about training this lens on an underappreciated market, but is there, I don't know, a specific wine or a maker who's got a uniquely compelling story? I guess they all are in a way. Or, I don't know, what would be that moment of ambition or the next breakthrough that you're kind of thinking about? Is there anything that stands out? Or maybe it's just a market you haven't yet kind of interrogated in the same way.
17:58Silvia Mella:I think almost, this is going to sound horrible, but the journey of it is what I'm excited about. And I think for us, what would be amazing is for someone to go on holiday somewhere like Greece, enjoy the wine there, come back, tell a friend, Greek wine's amazing. And then for that friend to say, you should try other wine because they've got not just Greek wine, but a whole host of countries that they work with. And it's because the winemaking community, like all the winemakers we work with have met each other and support each other. So there's really no ladder to climb or like nothing that we're focusing on as the end game other than just promoting all those winemakers and hopefully, yeah, encouraging people to try what they have to offer.
18:38Jack Blumsom:Jack, you'd probably go along with that, but, you know, is there a, I don't know, well, I don't know, maybe your card is marked. Maybe you've got one of those desk calendars where something's ringed in red already that you're specifically looking forward to, Or is it, as Gleb said, is it more just about what that next potentially unknowable step in the journey looks like?
18:54Silvia Mella:I think something we talked about in the early days and have been coming back to over the last few months is the kind of overall vision or ambition to be the go-to choice for the next generation of wine drinker. So it may not be the single wine that they buy every single time, but that there's a whole generation of wine drinker coming up who will know, understand and appreciate wines from other regions and ideally are wines from those other regions. So much of that comes in the trust in the brand. Because I think at the moment, there's a lot of trust in, as Gleb was saying earlier, there's a lot of trust in regions.
19:28Silvia Mella:So people might say, oh, it's 20 quid and it's French. I trust French and therefore it's good. But we would like it to be, oh, it's 20 quid and it's other. I trust other, whether it's from Slovakia or Mexico or India or wherever. So kind of flipping it slightly so that it's trust in the brand and not the region.
19:45Jack Blumsom:That was Jack Blumsum and Gleb Petrenko, the co-founders of Otherwine. And you can find out more about the business by heading to otherwine.co.uk.
20:04Jack Blumsom:You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Sylvia Mellor is the founder and creative director of Sorate, a New York-based tea company bringing high-quality Japanese matcha and simple, mindful tea rituals into busy city life. Originally from Italy, Sylvia spent more than a decade working in the fast-paced fashion and advertising world before feeling completely overwhelmed and stepping away on a solo trip to Japan that changed everything. What she experienced there sparked the idea for Sorate, which she launched in 2019 and has since grown into a network of thoughtfully designed tea houses in the Big Apple.
20:41Jack Blumsom:Sylvia caught up with our Laura Kramer about starting the business from scratch, blending Italian and Japanese influences, and creating calm in an ever-hectic city. Sylvia began by telling Laura about the meaning behind Sorate.
20:57Gleb Petrenko:The name itself, it sounds Japanese, but it's actually from Venice. In fact, some Japanese people sometimes are confused because they don't know what Sorate means in Japanese. And I tell them it's actually not Japanese, it's from Venice. Because Sorate itself in Japan means Thai. I played a little bit with the sound of it. And the logo is a perfect circle from one side, which refers to the Italian culture of Leonardo da Vinci. of Giotto, the Pantheon in Rome. And the other half is a Japanese Enzo. So the circle is a combination of the two cultures. And then on our menu, we offer a little bit of, like we have a matcha tiramisu paste, a little tart.
21:44Gleb Petrenko:Or during the holidays, we add the panettone, which is a very typical dessert in Italy during the holidays. We give a little bit of insights of Italian, because obviously it's made from an Italian. Sorate is an Italian name and it means calm down or relax. But we try to keep it as much as we can in traditional Japanese.
22:04Jack Blumsom:I love that because, you know, we think Italy, we think coffee, don't we? So often, yet here you were super inspired by this other hot drink, the tea. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you also worked with the tea master, right? What was the process from when you saw how they were doing it in Japan and you thought, you know what, I want to create a business for this and I want to bring this over here. Yes.
22:28Gleb Petrenko:So when I came back to the States, I tried to look if there was a teahouse that was making tea like that, a Japanese teahouse. And I saw that there was none specifically like open to the public that you can go in and out every day. But I saw that there was this tea master and she was making tea classes and private tea ceremonies in a private space close to Union Square. So I booked a session with her, a private session. She gave me the first tea ceremony in New York. And since then, she became my mentor, my teacher, my leader, my friend. I'm a student of her school because there is different kinds of school of tea ceremony.
23:08Gleb Petrenko:And she's the teacher of Omotesenke School. Today, I'm still her student and she's still like my mentor and she guides me through everything I do.
23:18Jack Blumsom:And so tell me about the business now. What does it look like? Because that was in 2019, right? When you had your trip. But since then, where are you based? What is the business looking like?
23:29Gleb Petrenko:Well, the trip was in 2018. And then I launched the business in 2019, so a year later. And the business started as an online platform because I was alone. I didn't add investors and I just went to Japan, found a farm myself, a farm that we partnered with. today and I started purchasing the product from them and I built the website myself because I come from the design world and the branding myself for the logo etc so I did this online platform and I started selling tea online and then COVID hit I was lucky because I was delivering a product that was healthy to people's home so the concept it kind of worked during the pandemic but then I felt that I needed a physical space to really show the visions of what I had in mind for Solate and that's when I met my business partner Nicola Zanatta which also comes from the same region in Venice that I'm from and they used to work in the beverage world for 15 years but in spirits more like wine and champagnes and he also wanted to look into something that was more healthy, more grounding for him.
24:46Gleb Petrenko:So together we opened the first Sorate location, which is in Soho. This was 2023. And two years later, September 2025, we opened our second location.
24:58Jack Blumsom:I love that. And so you sell matcha, tea accessories. I know you also sell ceramics now. It's really exciting. And also I see that you still have tea ceremonies as well. So you're now bringing that to other people. What is your favorite part about your job now that you have these two locations? Are you thinking about expansion down the line?
25:18Gleb Petrenko:Well, yes, I'm thinking we would like to open more because we want to give the opportunity to more people to experience this. What I'm really proud of is when somebody comes inside the space and even if our main business is to go, so like people take the drinks, order, take the drinks and go out. So we only have four seats where we do our, like we present with our ceramics and we do tea ceremonies. But the main reason is to go because we in a fast-paced city like New York, we want to give the opportunity to somebody that is rushing to work to have that two minutes, five minutes of tranquility during that time.
26:01Gleb Petrenko:So we're a customer of Sorate that comes inside the stores and tell us that they, oh I'm glad to be here I'm very relaxed when I come here I'm relaxed I feel like I made the point.
26:12Jack Blumsom:And with your plans to expand when you're looking at different areas what are some markers that you look for to say hey this this neighborhood is ready for us or I'd love to be in this area.
26:23Gleb Petrenko:I look for something that is residential because we want to give the neighbors an option but also So we look for a neighborhood that is also in the middle of the chaos. Even though all our stores are in the heart of the chaos, but they're not in the main streets of the chaos. So they're like a little bit moved on the side because it's like a little escape from the center. So we try to look for a space that reflects our identity, but it also solves the problem that we want to give.
26:55Jack Blumsom:Absolutely. You want to be needed.
26:57Gleb Petrenko:Exactly. Yeah.
26:58Jack Blumsom:I love that. And what are you most looking forward to then for 2026 or maybe even down the line? What are you most excited about for the business?
27:07Gleb Petrenko:Right now we are looking for more retail experiences. We have a partnership that we haven't sealed yet, so I can't disclose, but we are really excited if that comes true. So more retail experience. And within this, there is also a project of building a traditional teahouse. so a tatami tea house with a proper formal tea house in the middle of the city that would be a dream
27:34Jack Blumsom:That was Sylvia Mella the founder and creative director of Sorate you can find out more by heading over to sorate.co
27:53Jack Blumsom:And that is it for this episode of The Entrepreneurs. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. You can listen again and find out more about The Entrepreneurs at monocle.com. That's where, bit of advice for you, you can subscribe to Monocle magazine and ensure you're reading more about better businesses every month. You can also follow us and catch up with the archive wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to get in touch with the team, do email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to The Entrepreneurs.
From the publisher
Other co-founders Jack Blumsom and Gleb Petrenko discuss how they started a wine company championing less-explored regions after a fateful holiday in Georgia, one of the oldest wine-producing countries. Plus: how a trip to Kyoto inspired Italy native Silvia Mella to launch New York-based Japanese tea company Sōrate.
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