Trina Plamondon | Founder, Carpa Vino | Wine Importer, Vancouver BC
Trina Plamondon is the founder of Carpa Vino, a licensed wine import company operating in British Columbia and Alberta. She represents family-owned artisan wine producers across Burgundy, Portugal, Chile and Argentina, small estates without the reach of the companies dominating the Canadian market.
She does not sell wine. She designs wine systems that make money in hospitality.
What Carpa Vino does
Most independent restaurants cannot justify a dedicated wine hire, which runs $55,000 to $150,000 fully loaded. So the wine program becomes nobody’s job. It gets bought from a rep carrying hundreds of labels, whose incentive is volume rather than the operator’s margin. The result is a list nobody designed and a house pour nobody trades up from.
Carpa Vino works fractionally. The same logic as a fractional CFO or managed IT. Buying, list design, margin management, staff training and the guest-facing story, delivered across multiple venues for a fraction of a salary no independent could afford anyway.
Trina imports the wine directly, places it, and monitors how it performs. No distributor margin in between.
Background
Trina spent more than thirty years in public and social services sectors as an executive, educator, advocate and volunteer. That work shaped the thesis behind Carpa Vino: systems built to serve everyone always let people fall through the cracks.
Before wine, she founded Night Market Edmonton, the city’s first night market. She successfully lobbied for amendments to Edmonton’s city bylaws, reintroducing the public market category, reducing municipal fees for public market vendors and aligning regulations to create equity between public and farmers markets.
She is originally from Alberta, where her family is part of the history of African-American settlers who travelled by wagon train more than a century ago and settled in Amber Valley to escape racial segregation.
Credentials
- Diploma in Wines, Wine & Spirit Education Trust (DipWSET)
- Canadian Wine Scholar
- Champagne Certification, Comité Champagne, France
- BC Wine Ambassador, Level 2
- Certified Project Management Professional (PMP), Project Management Institute
- Bachelor of Education, Special Education, University of Alberta
- Licensed liquor agent, British Columbia and Alberta
Board and community service
- Vice President, Board of Directors, Vinica Education Society
- EDI Advisory Council Member, The Drinks Trust, Drinks United
- Past President, Rotary Club of Edmonton Urban Spirits
- Mentor, Commonwealth Women’s Mentorship Programme
- Parliamentary Riding Leader, ONE
- Member, Sustainable Wine Roundtable
- Member, The Porto Protocol Foundation
- Member, National Zero Waste Council
- Vice Chair, Monarch Childcare Society
- Former Chair, Community Services Advisory Board
Producers represented
- Domaine Franck Lamargue, Burgundy, France
- Domaine Jessiaume, Burgundy, France
- Quinta do Zambujeiro, Alentejo, Portugal
- Las Cinco Hermanas, Argentina
- Entrometido Wines, Chile
Also from Trina Plamondon
In the Press
CBC News, February 2023. Trina Plamondon was featured in national CBC coverage of Black professionals working to increase representation in Canada’s wine industry, speaking about entering the industry through the Vinica Education Society and finding community among BIPOC wine professionals. She now serves as Vice President of Vinica’s Board of Directors. Read the CBC feature
The KNOW Women, 2021. “Letter to Myself,” written by Trina Plamondon. Read the piece
At My Cellar Door, a podcast on business, wealth and wine.
Contact
Trina Plamondon Founder, Carpa Vino Vancouver, British Columbia carpavino.com