Your Downtown Neighbor: Wilibees Wine & Spirits

Can you tell me about Wilibees?
Downtown location is about two years old. We have another location in Petaluma, which is about ten years old. The concept was to deliver a mid-size wine shop, attached with a tap room that is more concentrated on selling spirits based on interaction, not just on a “stack it high and watch it fly” kind of approach. It’s more interaction based, more of a passion approach. So Wilibees, what I consider it as, it is basically a platform for people with similar passions to come together. Not that I claim to know everything about spirits, beers, wines and anything else. It’s just a platform. You get to meet the brewers, you get to meet the winemakers. What I play in my role, it’s basically a broker. I bring him in here, I bring you guys in here and I put you together and [say] okay go ahead, have a question and answer. Learn all you want to from him. So that’s my role, it’s a broker. It’s a platform I provide.

What does being in downtown mean to you?
Besides all of the challenges of being the newest downtown of Sonoma County - believe or not, that’s how we’re looked upon. We’re not known as the destination downtown to go to, if you think about Petaluma, you think about Sonoma, you think about Healdsburg, think of Sebastopol. Those all have established, so called, ‘downtowns’ or places where people can go to … what it means to be in downtown Santa Rosa? It’s the county seat, it’s the biggest city in the county, and Sonoma County is the number one wine destination in the world. The point was to open up a wine shop that if you were to go to Italy or if you were to go to France, and go to their wine country, what kind of wine shop would you walk into? What are the questions you would ask, what would you expect there? I’ve never been to Italy or France, but that’s the question I’m trying to answer: if somebody’s coming from Idaho, from New York, from wherever - if they come to downtown Santa Rosa and they want to know more about wine and they want to interact, I hope I’m the person that is able to answer those questions.

What are you looking forward to this year?
Well, this is the first summer where we’ll have the downtown fully open - it was open last year but not a lot of people knew about downtown being open and they were doing the market over there [on Courthouse Square.] So we’re definitely ready for the energy, the new energy, and excited to see what that brings.

Any other message for our readers?
A lot of time, energy and money went into redeveloping downtown Santa Rosa. Now is the time to come out and see how it’s working, even if you were in support or not in support of [reunification]. It is done, this is where we’re at. Any energy is better than no energy at all. And I think they did a very good job of re-routing the traffic so that it has sparked some interest in people’s minds. We’re here to stay and we want people to come check us out. Not just us, but the other restaurants that are coming so that there’s almost a rejuvenation of the downtown - it’s happening, come be a part of it!