Good Neighbor Podcast: Union
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Residents of Northern Kentucky! Based in Union, KY....The Good Neighbor Podcast helps the residents of Northern Kentucky get to know local business owners as people. We allow the business owners and influencers in NKY to tell the stories of how they started their business and why. We hear about their families, their personal interests and why they love living in and serving resident of Northern Kentucky!
Good Neighbor Podcast: Union
Wine, Wellness, and Community: Dr. Bob Coppola's Rosé Boutique and Wine Bar Journey
Join us for an organic conversation with Dr. Bob Coppola, whose passion for both chiropractic care and fine wines has led to the creation of Rosé Boutique and Wine Bar in Loveland, Ohio. Dr. Bob, alongside his wife, Colleen, has transformed their love for wine and retail into a charming haven named in honor of their daughter, Olivia Rose. Discover how they unexpectedly came across the perfect location and the cozy, intimate atmosphere they've cultivated, where guests can sip on a delightful Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley while browsing unique boutique offerings. Dr. Bob also shares insight into their innovative sip and shop concept and cutting-edge self-serve wine machines that elevate the traditional wine bar experience.
Explore the diverse world of wine flights at Rosé Boutique and Wine Bar, including the empowering "Totally for Girls" flight, celebrating female winery owners, and the robust "Shades of Red" flight for enthusiasts of deeper notes. Dr. Bob delves into their meticulous wine selection process, designed to ensure every guest finds a wine they love without overwhelming their palate. Beyond the wine, catch a glimpse of the retail magic curated by Colleen and the invaluable community support that bolsters this local gem. From special events like Small Business Saturday to festive town activities, this episode is a heartfelt toast to the vibrant spirit of Loveland and the welcoming embrace of Rosé Boutique and Wine Bar.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, mike Murphy. Thank you, charlie. Yes, I am Mike Murphy, the host of the Good Neighbor Podcast. We are a podcast based in Northern Kentucky. We talk to local business owners and influencers so that you can get to know them as people and not just logos or photo on a business card, but real human beings, because, yes, by God, all business owners are human beings. We're very, very human, and with me I have a human that you've seen on the podcast before or, if you listen, you've heard on the podcast before.
Speaker 1:With me is Dr Bob Coppola. You know him as Dr Bob. He is the owner of All-Star Chiropractic in Northern Kentucky, but today we're here, we're doing a remote from one of his other business interests up here in Loveland, ohio, and that is the Rosé Boutique and Wine Bar, and so that's what this podcast is about letting you all know what Dr Bob's got going on up in Loveland. He and his lovely wife Colleen, they've both had this passion for a while mostly Colleen, but Bob's totally on board, I can tell you. So, bob, thanks for having us into your wine bar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me on again.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. Last time we did a podcast, we talked about the Rosé Boutique and Wine Bar and I said we're going to talk about that one day and you said well, why don't you come and drink wine and we'll do a podcast together? So yeah, let's do the cheers right now. So thank you for sharing one of your passions with me. You've said this is your favorite wine, I believe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, favorite wine on our menu here On the menu, so what?
Speaker 1:is this, by the way?
Speaker 2:This is actually a Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley. Okay, jezebel is the brand the winery.
Speaker 1:It's very, very good. And also you know you've been a great host I'm going to show the charcuterie board that you put together here for us. So not only drinking, we're eating and we're enjoying life, which that's part of the wine culture is enjoying life, yes, and slowing down and enjoying the finer things in life. So Colleen's not here today, but excuse me, but she is a big part of why you ended up starting a wine bar. How did this come to be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had a business plan for a wine bar for many years now. Um, and my wife always wanted to own her own boutique. And it turned out our sons played summer baseball. Our son played summer baseball with previous owner of the space sun, okay, and they had a boutique here. They did a little bit with the bar. They have two other boutiques, though they wanted to downsize. So they called me up one day and they said what are your interests in purchasing it and rebranding it and kind of make it your own? And it's kind of calling us ready to get back to working again. And her passion was to have a boutique and my passion was to have my own wine bar and with my original business plan I never envisioned having a boutique with it. So it kind of worked out and the way we got the name was pretty neat. Our daughter's name is Olivia Rose.
Speaker 2:She always wanted to name a boutique called Olivia Rose. Well, when this came in, with the wine bar with it, and then we looked it up a little bit, just kind of researched. And Rose means love.
Speaker 1:We're in.
Speaker 2:Loveland Rose is a type of wine, so it kind of just came to fruition as Rose Boutique and Wine Bar.
Speaker 1:Okay, interesting. Yeah, I may have actually called it Rose Boutique and Wine Bar in the past, not quite understanding the connection, but yeah, it all makes sense, rosé. So you know, I say oftentimes the universe just kind of gives us what we need when we need it. Things just kind of happen for a reason. So that story in terms of how you came to find this place, that's kind of unique.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean a week before that we talked to them about this. I mean, we never thought we'd be owning a what some people call a bar teak or bar boutique.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. It's kind of unique. When I walked in, I in. This is the first time I've been here and I didn't know what to expect. There's a lot in here. It's a very elegant, very warm place. If people want to come and drink while they shop, can they do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can sip and shop. The boutique opens at 11 o'clock every day, the bar opens at 4, but, as you see, behind us right here we have self-serve wine machines where customers, if they want to have a glass of wine or they want to sit down sometimes we get book clubs in here they want to have a couple of glasses of wine and they want to sit and talk and then do a little shopping they're able to pour their own wines here.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what does that look like? I mean, do you pay after you leave? I mean, how do you, how do you? Do you get a card? Yeah, you get a white card.
Speaker 2:It's similar to. I had one in my pocket here. It's a little white card like this and you put it in the machine and you can pick a full glass, a half glass or a taste which is a one ounce pour, and then, when you're done, you give us back the card and we tell you how much you forgot you spent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know. It's great for you, but can be dangerous, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's really cool about the machine is we have some high-end wines in there that you really can't get at a restaurant or bar, because no restaurant or bar is going to open up expensive wine and serve it by a half glass, for example. So here, this machine keeps these wines fresh for 30 days.
Speaker 2:So we have my favorite wine ever, silver Oak, which is a $32 glass of wine which people come in here for $16 half glasses because they want to try silver oak without buying the bottle okay, yeah, okay, I can see the allure. Then we probably sell more of the two expensive ones in there versus anything. People want to try them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a nice perk of your setup here. So, wine aside, what's kind of like the next biggest category in here that people gravitate for?
Speaker 2:Sure, and it's changed. I mean, we're still evolving. We said we're going to do this for a year and then reevaluate what we need to do more of, what we need to do less of. She didn't have many clothing items to start and she she started adding them and it's gone really, really well. Probably her number one seller clothing and jewelry. Um, obviously, around the holidays Now we're almost, if you look around, we're almost out of our Christmas stuff. We had a really, really good first Christmas here.
Speaker 2:Um, one thing we sell a lot of it's funny as the jellycat stuffed animals. We sell those. I don't know what. I don't know what those are. I don't know what those are. They're made in England. They're in the corner over there and over there the kids love them, not even little kids, high school kids, early 20s. They're real popular on social media, on TikTok. Really. We sold a lot of them for high school girls doing gift exchanges with their friends. Yeah, we have a hard time keeping those on the shelves. Obviously, we have some food and wine type stuff, because we are a wine bar, so she has a lot of different jams and olive oils and different stuff like that on the charcuterie type.
Speaker 1:Okay, items yeah, so before we started recording, we got to eat some of the items that you have here, and a good charcuterie board, um, is something that I start to pick at and before you know it it's half gone. This is our small board. This is called our baby shark Everything's little, but boy, it goes quick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all our boards are custom here. We cut everything in-house, we mix them up different cheeses, different meats, different accompaniments. We have some dark chocolate, sea salt caramels on there, marcona almonds, different jams, um, around the holidays we've been putting rosemary and cranberries and pomegranate seeds and different things like that for our holiday boards. Okay, um, like I said, this is our baby shark two to three people, and then we have a great shark which is about four to six people. We have a couple of different whipped ricotta dips that are really popular here.
Speaker 1:Have you ever put together boards for parties, local parties?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we actually had a party here yesterday. It was actually an event, kind of a passing of the torch for a group, where someone else was kind of taking over and they wanted to honor him. So we had our great boards here, the great sharks, and we did about three of those and had the whipped ricotta dip and there's probably about 20 people here. How many employees do you have here? We have, along with Colleen, we have two other girls in the boutique side, then behind the bar there's one, two, three, four, five or six behind the bar.
Speaker 2:It's one thing that, as you know, makes a business. There are customers and staff. We have fantastic customers and we have fantastic staff. It makes our life a little easier because we are 45 minutes away, knowing that Saturday, for example, was Christmas in Loveland and we couldn't be here, so I had a basketball game. We were really really busy. We pulled up the cameras and we were like, oh my gosh, it's really busy here. But our staff I talked to somebody or one kind of our bar manager. She said that they crushed it. The staff did really really well manager.
Speaker 1:She said that they crushed it. The staff did really really well. How often does Colleen?
Speaker 2:get to drive up and be here. I'd say she's here two, three days a week and on the boutique side, I know she's usually here on Tuesdays it's the first day of the week to kind of go through everything, inventory and see what we need to buy, see what we need to shuffle around and stock stuff like that by the way, don't forget to look at the camera once in a while.
Speaker 1:Let people see your beautiful face. Good looking guy, and I love the logo too. That's. It's a nice looking logo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Kind of our taglines are right here Make poor decisions as you're pouring your wine. Then on the other side of there we have our rosé all day. It's kind of a favorite picture spot for everybody. People take pictures on the pink couch over there we have pink starbursts usually and they get pictures and post them, tag us, everything that's great, you've got a good marketing mind there, bob.
Speaker 1:So, when it comes to the wine itself, did you come into this with a lot of wine knowledge, or have you picked a lot of wine knowledge up since you opened, or has it been?
Speaker 2:a bit of both. I'd say it's a little both. I definitely had a wide background. I've been kind of a silent investor with a local wine bar in Covington Kind of got me, you know, more into the wine world. I am a level one sommelier certified. Oh, I didn't know that, yeah, so that's kind of understanding. You know wine in a restaurant bar type setting so I'm able to help people make decisions of what they want to try.
Speaker 2:We're real big too. If we have the wine open and you want to try it, we give people samples. We don't want you buying a glass of wine that you're going to hate. So we like to talk about wine. Wine should be discussed with friends and we like to do that and give them ideas. We're real famous for we do wine flights here. We get four two-ounce pours and a couple different ones. Our number one selling flight here is called Totally for Girls. It's four wines that are female winery owners or female winemakers. People love that. It's two whites, a rosé and a red. We have one called Shades of Red where it's four reds Red wine lovers they get. It's a Merlot, I'm sorry, it's a Pinot Noir, it's a Sangiovese out of Italy and then a Malbec out of Argentina, and then it finishes off with a Cabernet from California.
Speaker 1:All right, we tend to go into the wine store and just sort of pick a wine based on what label looks cool.
Speaker 2:That's very popular amongst wine drinkers and that is important. And when we came up with our wine list, I couldn't put just all the wines that I like and I had to watch putting wines that I don't think people are going to like. So a lot of times people aren't in. If you don't know a lot about wine, you might not be into old world wines France, italy so I can't load the menu up with those. So we had to put some wines that are favorable to people who maybe aren't avid wine drinkers but want to become avid wine drinkers.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I assume if people come in and they need to buy a corkscrew, you can help them out with that too.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Send them home with wine glasses.
Speaker 2:We do have a retail license here too, so all the wines behind us are available retail.
Speaker 1:So people come in here just to get a couple bottles of wine for a party. It's merchandise really nice. So how much of that is you and how much of that is Colleen?
Speaker 2:Colleen, 100% that side. Okay, maybe a little bit of my influence. If you go back in that corner over there there's a couple guys, t-shirts, bourbon, a couple of things like that, some socks, but for the most part she curated that whole entire area over there. And then for the wines, our distributor, our main distributor, is Cutting Edge Selections and they are fantastic. And I asked our sales rep. I said how do I know I'm going to like all the wine that's on the menu? I can't try them all. And she said why not?
Speaker 2:I went to the warehouse and before any wine makes it onto our menu, try it first. I think the first day we tried 39 wines. Now we're sipping, we're spitting it out. We had to make sure I'm not going to put a product on there that I can't stand by. Even if it's not my palate or my favorite wine, if I know it's going to be a wine that people are going to enjoy. And better have variety too.
Speaker 1:Even if you're spitting it out. It seems like just like you could go nose blind smelling too many scents. Can't you kind of dumb your palate down by tasting too much at once?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's some tricks you can do, though. You can take a little swig of sparkling wine, which kind of resets your palate. That's really good to do. Having some light bites like this can help that too. But yeah, you can get what they call wine palate fatigue, which could happen for sure. So maybe once towards the end, maybe they're not as good, I don't know.
Speaker 1:If you had to identify one wine, that's the most popular wine that walks out the door. Is there one?
Speaker 2:I'd say we have a rosé on the menu that is really popular. It's called House of Brown Rosé. It's a really good wine for maybe someone who's not into a real dry red wine. It's a rosé. It's not sweet by any means, but it has a fair amount of fruit to it, maybe strawberry in the palate, and we sell a lot of that. And that's also a female winery owner, female winemaker, which we're tailoring to a lot of women that come here to shop, so they like that a lot. Let's say our cabernet um, this one. We're drinking here the pinot noir. Then our highway 12 cabernet um, probably our top red wine sellers do you have only wine, or is there?
Speaker 1:do you have A few selection of bourbons here? Don't know what that was about.
Speaker 2:We don't have a spirits license. Here we're flickering.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll get that tanker.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we don't have a spirits license here. We have beer. So wine and beer is kind of the same license in most states in Ohio, for sure and the spirits license is separate. I don't think we're really looking to do that right now. We want to be able to pour wine and talk about the wine. We don't want to be a fast pace doing shots and mixed drinks. Yeah, running around with bartenders. I know we kind of like our atmosphere here. I think we're unique because we are the only wine bar in town right here. We're definitely the only bar boutique in town.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nice, because this is a beautiful area and it's, I'm sure, well traveled by shoppers and yeah, it's a little hallmark town and the city does a fantastic job of creating events Like Christmas in Loveland was last weekend. The lighting of the tree was the weekend before they do big stuff for Valentine's Day. There's only two Loveland's in the country one in Colorado and then Loveland Ohio, so Valentine's Day is really big for that reason. But there's always events going on in the town. The Chamber of Commerce here in the city they work really well together. Each one of them posts different events. They do a really good job. The customers around here and the people in Loveland like to shop. Local. Small Business Saturday was actually better than Black Friday for us.
Speaker 1:I think this place might be haunted. I'm not sure. Did you get a really good deal on this space? If you did, that could be why Might be haunted. I'm not sure. Did you get a really good deal on the space.
Speaker 2:If you did, that could be. Yeah, yeah, the customers here. We've developed some regulars, which is really fun. That's what you want. People come in and they know the bartenders and they say, hey, we came back to see you again and they want to stay local here.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, you guys have a have a great place here. You got a great thing going. You mentioned you're going to, you know, try it for a year or whatever, where. Where do we stand on that timeline right now?
Speaker 2:Well, I think as far as our not necessarily try it for a year, but see what we need to do more or less of versus try it and it's, it's definitely been great. But we know like certain days we needed more staff because we didn't know how that night was going to be, certain holidays or certain certain days, father's day was really slow here, we didn't know that. So we were extra staff because mother's day was really busy. But so you never know. We're learning things like that. We're learning. You know what type of wines and what type of food and what atmosphere people are looking for. So we already made some subtle changes. We atmosphere people are looking for. So we already made some subtle changes. We added to our menu.
Speaker 2:We did after six months into business we kind of flipped the whole wine menu. We probably added 10 to 15 wines and took away four or five. Certain wines are better for the winter. We added more reds for sure, took some whites away. We'll add those back. We'll add different white wines. We call them our patio pounders Good crisp white wines on a hot day. And then we have a patio out here. I don't know if you saw. So we did about 20-some people out at the patio and it's dog-friendly, and we have water bowls out there for dogs. We have a bike rack over in the front too, because the bike trail is right behind us.
Speaker 1:So bikers come on up here on their break. So this learning curve of a year that you're into. You've learned a lot already and you'll learn more. It sounds like you've put together a great experience for not only the people of Loveland but, gosh, all your Northern Kentucky friends. We want them to come up here too. We have a lot of friends from Northern Kentucky come up.
Speaker 2:We know it's a little bit of a drive but it's very unique. You're not going to find anything like this. We'd love to open up something like this in in Kentucky. Right now the time's not right, with just the cost of real estate, yeah, but I think eventually I would love to have it in my backyard as well.
Speaker 1:Well, like I said before, the universe gives us what we're supposed to have when we're supposed to have it. So settle down, it'll come. It'll come. No, it's been great getting to. You know, tour the place and see it and just kind of tell others about it. You know, tour the place and see it and and just kind of tell others about it. If somebody were to come in and you know they hear what you have going on here and they want to come in but they're not necessarily part of that wine world and they don't really know where to start, if somebody walks in and says I've always been intrigued by the world of wine and you know the mystique of it and it just seems so classy and so fun, but they don't know where to start, do you have a recommendation for them?
Speaker 2:I do, and that's when I want to pour them a couple of samples and try something. But I definitely have some starter wines. We don't necessarily have sweet wines here, but we have wines that are on the sweeter side. A lot of times when people come in they say I like sweet wine, I say, oh, you don't like wine, do you? But we have a couple of Rieslings that are on the sweeter side. That's a good starting point and that's kind of the path of most wine drinkers. They started somewhere and they're not in the same place. They started in New wine drinkers aren't drinking this or Cabernet, they're drinking more of the lighter reds or lighter whites, like a Riesling, like they work their way into Sauvignon Blanc and then maybe a Pinot Grigio into a Chardonnay and kind of. That order of progression is pretty good for people.
Speaker 1:Most of us started out with wine coolers. Yeah, you know. So I mean there's nowhere to go but up from there. Yeah, yeah, and I've always heard that the longer you enjoy wine and try wines and just kind of explore, the drier your tastes run. Does that tend to be true?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say you're going to get more full body wines and there's dry. I mean Pinot Noir, for example, is not a dry wine. Yet that's kind of down the line a lot of times on the wine journey, because it's a unique wine. Pinot Noir is very versatile. It's a fantastic wine, but not on the drier side versus Cabernet. And then you have Cabernets from different countries that aren't as dry. It has less tannins in there and tannins that suck the saliva out of your mouth it has less tannins in there and tannins that suck the saliva out of your mouth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've had Merlot's that are so dry that my friends try it and they say this is like drinking cotton.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's very stringent. So that's the tannins from the skins, from the seeds, from the stems, when they're doing the crushing.
Speaker 1:I still have a lot to learn, and many people out there do so. You're the man they need to come see to have fun while they're learning, and drink some good wine along the way. I've rarely come across a wine I don't like. It's just that you know. They all fit somewhere in the hierarchy.
Speaker 2:They do. And there's certain wines that are great for food and, for example, our Cabernet on the menu. I think it's one of the most balanced cabernets I've ever had, meaning you really don't need food with that. You don't need a big ribeye marbly ribeye to kind of offset the tannins or the dryness. It's got the perfect amount of acidity, perfect amount of fruit, perfect amount of dryness. It's a standalone drink, whereas I have some wines on the menu that do better with these meats and cheeses, and we have have a Chilean wine that has a really, really unique flavor profile.
Speaker 2:It does great with some of these meats and cheeses. You do know a lot about wine.
Speaker 1:A lot of practice, you could probably talk another hour or two. I love it. Yes, all right. Well, I think for our first visit, this has gone pretty well. You've informed us about wine and some of the other things that you've got here that we could show you everything. We don't have time right now, but the best way to understand it is to come and visit you and see for yourself. But it's a beautiful place. I want people to come and experience it for themselves, so our time for now is up. Once again, it goes so quick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But quite honestly, I'm looking forward to shutting this one down so we can attack the rest of this charcuterie board. Absolutely, and drink the rest of this wine. And the next time I see you we'll be God knows where. I mean we could be in the basement of your house one day. We might do that for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, where I mean we could be in the basement of your house one day.
Speaker 1:I'd do that for sure. Yeah, yeah, okay, there's a lot of good stuff down there as well, I'm sure. All right. Well, bob, thanks for your time. Thanks for inviting us in to learn about your wine shop here in Loveland, colleen, sorry you couldn't be with us this time. We'll catch up with you another time, don't worry. But you've put together a lovely, lovely shop here. So the Rosé Boutique and Wine Bar. Tell all your friends come on up, buy some wine, buy some other things. I'm not going to go into everything because there's too much, but come check it out for yourself. So that does it for this episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast. Everybody out there, be good to your neighbor until next time. See you everybody. Bye, bye. Everybody out there, be good to your neighbor until next time.
Speaker 2:See you everybody, bye-bye. Thanks for listening to the good neighbor podcast union. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpunioncom. That's gnpunioncom, or call us at 859-651-8330.