Keb Leeman looks like a typical Florida Keys guy -- white T-shirt, long hair, weathered face. Most locals recognize him as a restaurateur, owner of Parrotdise Waterfront Bar & Grille on Little Torch Key. But open a bottle of Big Pecker wine and another story emerges about family, cheese and wine.
"This is the official wine of the Florida Keys," he said of the brand he and his son, Ryan, founded. "We just claimed it."
It's not a mad grab for power, rather a progression of generations' worth of tradition and effort.
Leeman likes to tell the story about how Big Pecker came to be, born at a table in his restaurant. One of his daughter-in-laws was giving him a hard time about the name of his restaurant.
"She said, 'Parrotdise? That's a stupid name,' " he recounted. "At the time, though, there were tropical birds all around us including at the resort next door. We liked the idea of a wine named Big Pecker, a naughty play on words describing the beak of the bird."
That was in 2005 during a wine and cheese special event dinner at the restaurant. At a subsequent event in June 2006, Leeman and his son announced they were selling futures for their new RVino label, Big Pecker. On Nov. 29 that year, they bottled their first wine.
By 2008, Big Pecker was named the official wine of Fantasy Fest and today is sold by all the local retailers -- Publix, Winn-Dixie, Bone Island Liquors in Key West, Marathon Liquors and Big Pine Liquors. The brand this year was the official wine not only for Fantasy Fest, but for the recent Parrot Head convention.
Leeman said he's satisfied with the label's progress in the market, but he has much bigger plans. Though he won't divulge exactly how much wine he has sold, or even the percentage of profit per bottle, he will say it takes time to establish a label and you have to sell a lot of bottles to be solidly in the black.
"Eventually, I'd like to bottle enough wine to mass market, and see it everywhere," he said.
Most people struggle in the wine aisle of their grocery store, not knowing what they want, he said.
"They try to remember what they bought last time, or the wine their friend recommended, and then they go home and open it and are surprised if it's good," he said. "I want them to know Big Pecker is going to be good. We're going to maintain the consistency. That's the science and the secret of making wine."
The four P's
The grapes are grown in almost desertlike conditions in Lodi, Calif., where Ryan makes the wine at the Van Ruiten Family Winery, where he is the head winemaker.
The conditions are ideal, Leeman said, because the usual scourge of the grape -- mold, pests, fungi -- find it difficult to get a toehold in the arid conditions. At the moment, Big Pecker has two varieties -- a chardonnay and a cabernet sauvignon.
In promotional materials, the chardonnay is described as "fruit forward and smooth with a long finish." The cabernet has "rich red cherry and warm cinnamon aromas."
Neither is burdened by a hint of wine snobbery and to prove it, the wine comes in bottles with Stelvin-type closures. That's wine-industry lingo for screw caps. Leeman was quick to point out they are superior to corks.
Pat Kavanaugh of Bone Island Liquors in Key West said the wine retails for about $13 a bottle and fills a niche.
"It appeals to the tourists who are visiting the Keys. They like to take home something that's different. They're looking for a rum they can't get at home, a wine they can't get at home, a beer they can't get at home," Kavanaugh said, adding Big Pecker certainly has laid the foundation for success. "It's all about the four P's -- package, promotion, price and product. We've carried it right from the very beginning and it's a good Keys product in the wine category."
To promote the wine, Big Pecker "employs" Brutus, a red macaw, and Longfellow, a cockatoo. The advertising characters narrate a fictional back story about how the wine came to be, much like the gecko that speaks for Geico or the cows that promote the California dairy industry.
"According to a wine survey, the fastest way to increase wine sales is to put an animal on the bottle," said Steve Calderwood, The Citizen's wine columnist. "What's really interesting is that 10 years ago, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would not allow anything cute or funny on a wine bottle. Now the floodgates are open and Big Pecker jumped in there with both feet."
Calderwood acknowledged there's a big market for inexpensive wine. What's difficult, he said, is finding a good wine at that price point.
"You have to work to find them," he said.
While Brutus' and Longfellow's fictional story is a great marketing hook, the real story is much more compelling and starts in Switzerland.
From cheese to wine
Leeman's paternal grandfather was a successful architect from Zurich. He immigrated in the late 1920s to an area of Ohio known as "Little Switzerland." His maternal grandfather landed in Mineral City, Ohio. During prohibition, he was a part-time bootlegger. During the winter months, when even the smugglers wouldn't cross Lake Erie, he made Limburger "shelf cheese" and sold it come springtime.
"That's how the Swiss people are," he said. "They're industrious."
The architect's son, Hans, managed a farmer's co-op in Brewster, Ohio. When it went up for sale in 1965, he bought the facility and transformed it into what eventually would become Brewster Dairy. Leeman's father, John, called on both his sons to develop the business into what is now a huge concern.
"At the time I left the business in 1997, it was producing 250,000 pounds of cheese a day. That's 33 percent of all the Swiss cheese in America," he said, adding that the cheese is then labeled by companies such as Sargento. Incidentally, the company's dominance of the Swiss cheese market had very little to do with ancestry. It was a calculated move, he said, to get a foothold in the markets with the highest returns.
Leeman is proud of the innovations the Brewster Dairy pioneered in the cheese factory. Many had to do with the efficient production of bulk cheese-making, and he said he designed much of the apparatus himself, as well as designed the buildings to house the manufacturing process.
They were happy years when the family's recreational time was spent experimenting with its own fermented products from wine made with local grapes or fermented strawberry juice.
Leaving the family business was a difficult move, Leeman said, but the process of starting over is a welcome challenge and one that has strengthened family ties with his three sons.
Family affair
Damon, the oldest son at 40, lives in Ohio. He owns and manages a winery and restaurant at Perennial Vineyards. It boasts an international wine cellar, its own wine, and, of course, some bottles of Big Pecker. Leeman said his son is a Renaissance man who can do anything -- make wine, fix plumbing or run all the lab tests for his wife's veterinary practice.
"He's so productive. I admire him so much," he said with deep satisfaction.
Ryan, 37, is the son who's most closely involved with Big Pecker. He is an award-winning winemaker and has put in time at Paumanok Vineyards on Long Island, recognized by the literati such as The Wine Advocate, Bon Appetit Magazine and The New York Times.
In 2001, his cabernet sauvignon and merlot were named the best from Long Island when it came to the attention of an assistant for Michel Rolland, an expert wine and winemaking consultant. He later worked at the Silver Lake Winery in Washington state.
"In my family we call him 'just the winemaker,' " Leeman said with a laugh. "He has a palate and he's also a scientist. When he's making wine he can stand over a vat of 5,000 gallons and tell when it needs an extra gallon of this or that."
The wine experts at The Wall Street Journal noticed his success. A Van Ruiten zinfandel was named one of the 12 best wines by a panel of judges headed by celebrated wine expert Hugh Johnson. Ryan attended a newspaper party at the Tribeca Grill, co-owned by Robert De Niro, in New York City just last month.
A third son, Courtney, is indirectly responsible for how Leeman found himself owning and managing a restaurant in his retirement years. He worked at Parrotdise before his father bought it.
"When he was hired at Parrotdise, I came to know the owners a little bit. When they were in financial difficulty, I became a managing partner," Leeman said. "That lasted less than a year before I bought them out."
Courtney, who suffers from a mental disability, since has moved on and is living independently on the mainland.
"He has a beautiful mind. I'm just as proud of him as I am of my other sons," he said.
At the moment, Leeman is concentrating on expanding the distribution of Big Pecker Wine.
"I want to see it in every state," he said. "I want Big Pecker Wine to be in every household, at special events and poured at fun restaurants and bars."
It's this last notion -- that wine can be casual and fun and the opposite of stuffy and intimidating -- that may be the key to Big Pecker's success.