Life & Work with Sarah Hicks of Downtown Rocky Mount

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Hicks.

Hi Sarah, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Originally from Seattle, WA, I started my wine journey after graduating college and moving to Sonoma, CA. It was here that I found my love of wine and fell in love with my husband. I worked for Duckhorn Wine Company, where I learned the finer details of the agriculture around growing grapes, as well as chemistry and finesse of the winemaking process. After 7 years of enjoying Sonoma, my husband and I got married and decided to move to his hometown of Rocky Mount, NC. We spent a year in North Carolina when my husband was presented with an amazing opportunity to help open a restaurant on Hilton Head Island. We spent a little over a year in South Carolina, him running the restaurant and I running a small wine boutique and lounge off the island. During this time, I realized I loved running a wine retail business and talking to customers about wine. It became a true passion for teaching about wine! We soon learned that we were pregnant with our son and truly wanted to be around family, so in 2015, we packed everything in South Carolina and moved back to Rocky Mount.

After a few years of working for a non-profit in Rocky Mount, I was missing my passion for working in the wine industry, and I desperately wanted to open my wine shop. In 2018 I focused on the tremendous task of starting my own business, and in November 0f 2018, we opened Bin & Barrel Wine Bottles and Bar. We offer hundreds of different labels for sale, as well as at least 20 different wines by-the-glass, and a small snack menu. We offer wine education classes monthly and quarterly and a customizable wine club.

We have been open 4 years, made it through the ups and downs of the Covid pandemic, and have come out bruised but standing on the other end. We are thankful for our local supporters who went out of their way to keep our doors open for the last 4 years, and we hope to continue serving the Rocky Mount Wine Lovers in future years!

We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Small business owners will never be smooth, no matter how well you manage or how many years you have been in business. There are new challenges every day, and your success will determine how well you manage the obstacles thrown at you. We have had several challenges along the way, including a leaky roof (that took 3 years to fix finally!), employee turnover, shutting down for covid, and the hardest challenge – finding ways to continue to promote your business in a small town, and enticing new customers. The difficulty of constantly driving in traffic will forever be my greatest challenge. There are so many avenues to promote your business that keeping up with it all is a full-time job.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For readers who might need to become more familiar, what can you tell them about what you do?
We specialize in finding the perfect bottle of wine for each customer. Our talented and knowledgeable team asks the best questions, knows our inventory inside and out, and can pick out the perfect bottle of wine for any occasion. We specialize in finding the hidden gems of the wine world. Our goal is to support small, family-owned wine producers who make delicious wine but are less well-known than their counterparts or neighbors. You may not recognize most of our labels, but we promise you will love the wine in the bottle.

We are also one of the few wine shops/wineries that customize their Wine Club shipments to the specific customer’s taste. We have close to 100 wine club members, and each member receives a different curated wine box every quarter – one specific to their preferences and taste. One of the best reasons to live in a small town, you know your customers and you know their families, and you know what they like to drink. So, picking out a wine for them to enjoy is easy and fun!

Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
My customers know me as a wine lover, but most don’t know that I used to hate wine! I started as a huge fan of craft beer and ciders. Living in the Pacific Northwest, craft breweries were on every corner (along with a coffee shop), so finding fun and new beers was always exciting. When I moved to Sonoma, I found a true love of wine. And the love for wine did not start with tasting. It started with the passion for the artistry behind making wine and curating the vine. Good wine starts with good farming, and when I started learning about the fine points of growing grapes and how difficult it can be, I started getting into the winemaking process and nuances of flavors. There is so much behind making one bottle of wine, and learning every step of the process is fascinating and not something to be taken for granted. But a good cold beer is still great at the end of a long day!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.binandbarrelwine.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/binandbarrelwine/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/binandbarrelwine/