In Savigny-lès-Beaune, a village in the heart of the Côte-d’Or in Burgundy, France, the vineyards run far and wide, and silky red and complex white wines are in great abundance. Five years ago, alumnus Nicholas Harbour and his wife Colleen could only dream of such a place. But now, away from the corporate world, they reside there on the eastern slope, making gourmet wines and sharing their passion and their story with others. 

“Coming here and doing wine, you get to really see the grapevines grow throughout the year, you see the impact of the weather on them (and) you see the impact of the people on them,” Harbour said. “But I think what really strikes our passion for wine is the human aspect.”

Harbour and Colleen met in high school in Luxembourg, and parted ways when Harbour attended college at the University, and Colleen studied in Canada. After completing their undergraduate studies, the high school sweethearts moved back to Luxembourg in 2008 and both worked in the financial industry for five years. After they got married, they had a discussion about their goals and passions in life and realized that finance was not something they wanted to continue. They quit their jobs in Luxembourg and moved to France to explore their true interests.

“Over the course of going to wine school in Beaune, I had to do a few projects for school, like a business plan,” Colleen said. “So I wrote a business plan about starting a winery, and then thought, ‘Why don’t we just start a winery? We’re here, we’re learning about it, we really don’t have anything to lose. The only thing we can do is try, and if we don’t try, we’ll never know.’”

Harbour studied the technical aspects of winemaking in the wine school in Beaune while Colleen studied the commercial side of wine. Their winery, a micro négociant vinificateur, is called Maison Harbour. 

Business administration professor Jeffrey Kurtz’s Small Business Consulting class, BADM 445, is working with Maison Harbour to develop a strategy to import the wines to America.

The class is divided into six teams of students who each work with a client. Next semester, Kurtz will be looking for 24 clients to pair with the 24 teams in his classes. The students go through the entire consulting process and identify the issues they see in a business to lead it toward success.

“The big takeaway for my students is you get the opportunity to do something that’s unique — defining the problem — which is a very challenging thing to do,” Kurtz said. “Symptoms sometimes masquerade as problems. So it’s a good process for you to get used to — peeling those layers away and asking why all the time.”

While at the University, Harbour was a student of Kurtz’s and reached out to him this year to see how his students could connect him directly to the American market.

“Our goal of our business is to bring (Maison Harbour’s) Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to the American market,” Harbour said. “So since we have this connection to North America, we hope to be able to reach a lot of different consumers in the U.S.”

Through this model, wine from Maison Harbour will be shipped directly to customers’ homes instead of partnering with third parties in the U.S.

In order for the wine to reach consumers in the U.S., the product must meet Food and Drug Administration regulations and individual state laws. Harbour and Colleen meet with the students once a week on Skype, usually with a glass of wine in hand. The students are focusing on cost comparisons between starting an import business and working with an already established importer of wine, such as selling wine on Amazon.com.

“Hopefully by the end of the school year, they’re going to say it’s better for you to start your own thing because it’s almost the same price and in the end you’ll make more money like that,” Harbour said.

Maison Harbour just completed the winemaking process and predicts that the wine will be ready for distribution around next December, at the earliest. In total, from growing the grapes to putting them in the barrel, the winemaking process takes about two years. The wines come from Côte de Beaune and Côte de Nuits, and the Harbours hope to produce about 10 or 11 barrels for next year and double in size the following year. 

“We don’t drink too much wine alone,” Harbour said. “But we really enjoy to have people over and to open a really nice bottle of wine and talk about where it came from, the year that the grapes were grown … whether they’re on a steep slope or on a valley. … That kind of human connection is really what drives our passion for wine.”

Alice can be reached at [email protected].