Southern Wine & Spirits’ Wayne Chaplin gets in the spirit for his biggest business party of the year—the South Beach Wine & Food Festival.
Wayne Chaplin, president and CEO of Southern Wine & Spirits, at FIU’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management, in the school’s Restaurant Management Laboratory.
On most workdays when in town, Wayne Chaplin, president and CEO of Southern Wine & Spirits, sits in his office, working with suppliers to build a brand that, today, is the country’s largest wine and spirits distributor, with 14,500 employees from Maui to Maine and $11.4 billion in sales in 2013. It is number 28 on Forbes’s list of America’s largest private companies, representing more than 1,500 wine, spirits, beer, and beverage suppliers from around the world. But on one Sunday a year—in this case Sunday, February 22—Chaplin puts his feet in the sands of South Beach and soaks it all in. “Every year, I enjoy walking through the Grand Tasting event and watching people sample all of our suppliers’ great wines and spirits,” he says of the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival, which takes place this year from February 19-22.
It was Chaplin and the team at Southern Wine & Spirits who started the festival in 1997, known then as the Florida Extravaganza, a one-day wine tasting and food-pairing event held on the north campus of Florida International University. The goal was simple: introduce people to their brands of wine and raise money for FIU. “It was just kind of a small, intimate event that we hoped would raise some money, and by 1999, we were able to open up the Southern Wine & Spirits Beverage Management Center, with a lecture hall and a tasting room, which is obviously state of the art,” says Chaplin. “In 2000, when Lee [Brian Schrager] joined Southern Wine & Spirits, he saw what we were doing and decided it was time to take the event to the next level.”
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Lee Brian Schrager, Michael Symon, Arlene and Wayne Chaplin, Chrissy Teigen, and John Legend at The Q and Flaunt event to kick off the 2014 South Beach Wine & Food Festival at the Delano.
Schrager moved the Extravaganza to South Beach in 2002, gave it a new name, found corporate sponsors, and over the past dozen years, turned the South Beach Wine & Food Festival into what, in 2014, consisted of 70 events over four days with 300 celebrated chefs and winemakers, raising $2 million for what is now the Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management at FIU. “Lee Schrager is a magician and visionary, and he has taken this festival with the Food Network to a place no one would have ever imagined,” says Chaplin.
To date, the festival has raised more than $20 million for the school, creating scholarships and facilities like the Mel Dick Wine Tower and the Wine Spectator Restaurant Management Laboratory. “There’s no other hospitality school that has that type of teaching laboratory for students and the most amazing state-of-the-art kitchen that anyone has ever seen,” says Chaplin. “The dean has ideas about expanding that into a brewing science laboratory and food production laboratory, and now there is also the Chaplin Hospitality School in China.”
The festival itself is a big business. Corporate sponsors like the Food Network, Mastercard, Whole Foods, and KitchenAid support the event that, in 2014, garnered more than 4.5 billion media impressions, and welcomed celebrity chefs, Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, and Hollywood’s biggest foodies. More than $1 million worth of Southern Wine & Spirits’ beverage offerings were consumed at the festival last year. “In 2013, the US became the largest wine-consuming country in the world, surpassing France,” says Chaplin. “I’m not saying that happened because of our festival in any way, shape, or means, but by exposing people to wine over time, it continues to help grow the wine business.”
Chaplin with Southern Wine & Spirits’ Mel Dick at the FIU Teaching Restaurant inaugural dinner during last year’s festival.
Chaplin’s company and industry as a whole also benefit from the education they are helping to provide FIU students, who work at the festival and at various venues around town during their school tenure. “Students become an amazing resource for us to recruit from,” says Chaplin. “The school is putting out some amazingly talented young people.”
So on that Sunday, Chaplin will smile. He’ll see the students working, the consumers drinking wine and spirits, and the city of Miami Beach hosting one of the greatest food festivals in the country. Says Chaplin, “It’s a fabulous success story, and we’re all lucky to be able to do something that we love and at the same time be able to give back to the community.”