Politics to Pinots, Metro Wines Co-Owner Gina Trippi Discusses the Varietals of Life Written by Meg Hale Brunton
Metro Wines co-owner and Marketing Director Gina Trippi has made a splash (or rather a pour) in the Asheville wine market, but feels that her path to this point has been anything but straight. She jokes that the people she knows who took a more direct course to success missed out on all the fun she had along the way. “I really went where the wind blew me,” she acknowledges. “I would urge people to follow their path - whatever feels right.”
As a New Orleans native, Trippi said she grew up thinking that everywhere was like New Orleans. “I thought the whole world was like this,” she explains. “I thought everybody had Mardi Gras, and everybody ate red beans on Mondays.” She didn’t learn otherwise until she went to college in Tennessee at UT Knoxville, which she says was as far North as her father would let her go for school. He steadily drove Trippi toward becoming a lawyer even though she was interested in studying Mass Communications and becoming a broadcast journalist.
While she admits she didn’t enjoy law school, she did well, passed the bar and graduated in a class of about five women. She got a job as a lawyer’s assistant with a small private firm in St. Petersburg, Florida. One day, she got a call from the Public Defender in Tampa who had seen her in court and wanted her to come work with their team. She took the job because of the opportunity to choose her cases and argue in court on a regular basis. “I’m a big fan of justice,” she explains. “If you want to touch the constitution, you’re not getting that anywhere except as a Public Defender.”
In 1985, Trippi moved to Oregon to take a job as Legal Advisor to the Labor Commissioner, a job she loved, as it dealt heavily with civil rights legislation including discrimination cases based on age, race, gender, sexual preference and physical handicaps. Eventually, Trippi opted to go back to school at Georgetown University and earned her degree in Securities Regulation. From there, she became a litigation attorney for the office of the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington D.C. It was there she met her husband, John, who was a bank examiner. After they got married, he was transferred to Seattle. Trippi had secured a job there with the FCC, but the job moved to Los Angeles, and Trippi did not want to relocate. So, she stayed in Seattle and began taking mainly pro-bono cases for non-profit organizations. “That’s where I got off the boat of practicing law for the federal government, or for pay even,” Trippi says.
In the early 1990’s, there were several large bank mergers in the U.S., so Trippi’s husband was transferred to a new location fairly often. The couple went from Seattle to Pittsburgh, then from Pittsburgh to Chicago. In Chicago,Trippi got a job doing PR work for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. She had also been volunteering with the office of Senator Don Harmon, and he introduced her to his seat-mate in the Illinois Assembly, Barack Obama. Obama was just beginning his campaign to run for Senate and came to speak to Harmon’s office. “I went home and I told John that I had just met America’s first black president,” she says. “He seemed like he was the kind who could unite people. He seemed like he had a good grasp of the issues. I thought he would really stop the divisions between people.” So, Trippi volunteered for the West Elect Committee to Elect Obama. After he won the democratic nomination, she became the Regional Director for the Campaign, Obama for Illinois. “I really did like political work,” she says of working on the campaign. “It really combined my law degree with all the things I liked: writing, public speaking.”
“I think everybody should work on a political campaign,” Trippi continues. “Because at any level, what you learn about people and marketing - it’s just a world of information in a year about how to put groups together, how to sell a product - a product is a product, whether it’s a candidate, or a bottle of wine.”
After Obama won the State Senate, Trippi opted to go to Washington D.C. and once there, she joined Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “I thought she was very honest and dedicated,” Trippi says of Clinton. “I could see she wanted to get down to work right then.” Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic Presidential Primary nomination in 2008, and Trippi was left with plenty of experience and no job. She had also lost one of her two beloved older dogs. Her vet recommended rescuing a retired racing greyhound instead of a puppy.
Trippi’s oversized, one-eyed greyhound Four Wheels was her pride and joy. After falling in love with him and the breed itself, she offered her long list of skills, including press work and web design, to a greyhound rescue group out of Chicago. She eventually helped start a program out of Florida called the Sunset Project, which rescued former-racing greyhounds who were being abused and mistreated after their running careers ended and adopted them out all over the country.
In 2011, Trippi’s husband retired. He had a keen interest in wine, and so Trippi suggested that he use it as a bridge to ease out of a full-time career. The couple decided to start a small, online wine business. ”We liked meeting the people and we liked the industry people associated with it,” she says of their experience selling wine.
In 2013, the couple relocated to Asheville, NC for the temperate weather. Their real estate agent informed them that a retail space on Charlotte Street had just become available. “Within minutes, John had signed the lease,” Trippi recalls, laughing. That is how Metro Wines began. They had formed relationships with wine distributors and trusted them to give them their best wines. “I knew some bare bones going in,” Trippi says of the wine world. “We both liked wine and tried to train ourselves through the years, and listened to the distributors and the importers.”
One of Trippi’s favorite aspects of her job is writing the Metro Wines newsletter The Public Palate: Putting Wine in its Place. “What I really like about wine is the thread through history,” she explains. “I like the continuity and all that it encompasses: friends, family and community. ” Trippi says she has also had to flex her legal muscles in the interest of Metro Wines on occasion for things like copyright issues and working with online payment providers. “My father was right,” she says. “A law degree always comes in handy.”
Trippi acknowledges that the wine industry is male-dominated. “I don’t like it when men come in and walk right past the women and go to one of the men, thinking we don’t have any knowledge,” she says. “It happens all the time.” She says that more female sommeliers and wine-makers are joining the industry every day, but there is still a misconception that men know more about wine. She adds that women actually have a more sensitive palate. “Women are the best tasters, it’s just a biological fact,” she notes. “We have more tastebuds. We have the best chance of being the better tasters.”
“If there is yet another chapter in this very long, complicated life, I would like to go to Italy and stay,” Trippi says, stating that she has already begun learning Italian. She also says that moving to Italy wouldn’t interfere with her ongoing work in animal rescue. As an over 40-year member of PETA, as well as a member of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, Trippi knows there will always be animals in need of her help. “At this point in my life, it’s really all about the animals.”
Metro Wines
169 Charlotte St
Asheville, NC 28801
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