Catering to Wall Streeters’ expensive tastes can be just as lucrative as high finance itself. Just ask Jason Richelson, a 31-year-old former stock and derivatives trader who in February opened Greene Grape Downtown, a wine and spirits boutique in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district.
Richelson has turned his love of fine wines into a new career. In May 2004, while still a trader on the American Stock Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange for market-making firm Bluefin Trading, Richelson decided to open a wine store on the side. The original Greene Grape, named for the Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn where it stands, quickly took off. That gave Richelson the confidence to leave trading behind and open a second location at the corner of Nassau and Liberty Streets, just a cork-pop from the Federal Reserve’s New York branch. The new store caters not only to Richelson’s highly paid former colleagues on Wall Street but also to the growing ranks of New Yorkers who choose to live in the area.
Fittingly, Richelson is getting a helping hand from another booster of capitalism: the Wall Street Journal. In their Friday column, “Tastings,” the newspaper’s influential husband-and-wife enologists, Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, have featured several of the wines that Richelson carries. “Every time they review a wine we sell, it sells out,” says the entrepreneur. The effect on sales in the Lower Manhattan store has been so strong that if Richelson doesn’t carry one of the wines mentioned in the column, he immediately orders as many bottles as possible. Now, that’s a savvy trader.
