You don’t have a wine department. You have a list someone built once.
Trina Plamondon, Founder – Carpa Vino
Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) · Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) · Diploma in Wine & Spirits (DipWSET) · Canadian Wine Scholar · BC Wine Ambassador (Level 2) · Champagne Certificate, Comité Champagne · Licensed Wine Importer, British Columbia & Alberta · 30+ years business analysis, systems design, public and social sectors.
Most hospitality businesses don’t have a wine department. They have a wine list someone built once and a rep who calls occasionally. Carpa Vino is different. No middleman. No markup. No conflict. Everyone else in this business is built on this dependency.
A sommelier or consultant picks from what distributors offer them, working with access they don’t own and can lose. An importer or distributor owns the wine but profits on every bottle, so their advice is never neutral.
I’m not depending on a distributor to keep a guest’s favourite in stock. I control the supply line myself. “We’re out” stops being someone else’s failure you have to apologise for.
Carpa Vino is the wine department: the strategy, the supply, the training, and the ongoing management, without the overhead of a full-time hire. It’s a combination you won’t find anywhere else in this market, because it takes being the importer and the program manager at once, and almost no one is both.
Proven before it was offered
Before the Wine Program Blueprint, there was a night market. Building a event with wine bar and tasting program that drew 6,000 to 8,000 people through a weekend event, in a community with no existing wine culture to speak of, was the first proof that a well-designed wine experience does not need an existing audience. It needs a system. The licensing, the curation, the programming, the education, all of it built from scratch. That is still what Carpa Vino does.
Carpa Vino was proven at the event level before it was offered at the program level. The system works. The licensing is in place. The supply relationships are built. The proven system is documented. What is rare is finding all of that in one place, and that is exactly what makes this different.
Wine strategy is business strategy
The decisions that make a wine program work, pricing discipline, supply planning, margin management, staff systems, are the same decisions that make any business work. I have spent real time learning from some of the most rigorous business builders in the world, including Joe Foster, founder of Reebok, Adam Coffey of The Chairman Group, and John Catsimatidis, & JT Foxx. These are not wine people. That is the point. The discipline they brought to building their businesses is the same discipline I bring to building wine programs. It shows in how Carpa Vino is built.
Most venues are leaking money in four places at once: wine cost running too high against beverage revenue, margin no one’s watching, cash tied up in dead stock, and a manager spending paid hours buying wine they were never trained to buy. A managed program closes all four.
Who’s behind it
I am Trina Plamondon, founder of Carpa Vino. I have spent over thirty years in the public and social sectors doing one thing: building systems that work with the resources available at the time. What I found in hospitality was a sector making the same mistakes I had spent decades fixing elsewhere. The same symptoms. The same gaps. The same potential going unrealised.
As a credentialed project management professional and educator, I design programs that deliver more within existing budgets and keep running after I leave the room. It is precise, unglamorous, necessary work. The Wine Program Blueprint is what systems thinking looks like applied to hospitality’s most underleveraged asset.
The producers in my portfolio
I work with small family-run estates that share the same passion and drive as me. They are risk takers, mavericks, people connected to the earth and to others. While they are serious about their craft, they are also filled with joy, laugh often, and take life as it comes. They are my people.
Why wine?
I am many things. I am different cultures. I am a lover of wine, music, art, food and laughter.
Carpa Vino is a Canadian company. The name is a play on words, an homage to the Italian wine bottle in the shape of a fish, and to the Carpas, the theatres that evolved from Aztec tradition, where people came together under one tent to be entertained and forget their daily troubles.
When you put wine, food, friends, good conversation and music together, a memory is created. And as time passes around the table, you find yourself wading through the comedies and dramas of life together.
Wine is not just about what is in the glass. Carpa Vino brings those worlds together: wine knowledge, business structure, and the ability to turn good bottles into better hospitality outcomes.
Assess. Design. Install. Manage.
“Drinking good wine with good food in good company is one of life’s most civilized pleasures.”
Michael Broadbent