mike@fws3t.com
Fine Wine & Spirits 3T Consulting
Leadership Built on Five Decades of Doing the Work

Adult Beverage Industry Consultant with Wine and Spirits Expertise

Fine Wine & Spirits 3T Consulting is a boutique advisory practice built for wine and spirits businesses that need real operator experience — not another consultant with a slide deck. As an adult beverage industry consultant, Mike Fine brings practical insight to each engagement.

Mike Fine brings five decades of hands-on leadership across every tier of the industry — supplier, distributor, and retailer — delivering the strategic counsel, operational discipline, and market knowledge that brands, retailers, and restaurants need to grow profitably and sustainably.

By the numbers

50 years of wine and spirits industry experience. Three-tier expertise across supplier, wholesale, and retail/restaurant channels. National market knowledge across on-premise and off-premise channels. Fractional engagement model that scales with your business and your budget. One trusted advisor. No junior associates. No hand-offs.

Our Mission

To help wine and spirits businesses grow profitably and operate more efficiently — across every tier, every channel, and every class of trade.
Most producers, retailers, and restaurants face the same challenge: the U.S. three-tier system is complex, margins are under constant pressure, and building experienced internal leadership is expensive and slow. Fine Wine & Spirits 3T Consulting was created to solve that gap.
Mike functions as an extension of your business — a trusted strategic advisor who brings five decades of real operator experience to your specific situation. No overhead. No long-term commitment. No junior associates learning on your dime. Just hard-won expertise, deployed exactly where you need it, when you need it.

Why FWS 3T Consulting?

  • Mike Fine is not a distributor — he is an advisor. He doesn't warehouse inventory, manage a sales force, or run a territory. Instead, as a three-tier distribution consultant, he builds the strategy, identifies the opportunities, and gives you the kind of counsel that only comes from someone who has sat in every seat at the table — as a winery executive, a distributor leader, and a retailer.

  • This model is built for businesses at every stage:

  • Wineries and wine companies seeking distribution strategy, market structure, and channel clarity
  • Retailers — online and brick-and-mortar — seeking operational discipline, margin management, and growth strategy
  • Restaurants and wine bars seeking beverage programs that actually drive revenue
  • Emerging brands seeking the structure, placement strategy, and three-tier navigation to compete in a crowded market
  • Established brands seeking a trusted outside advisor to sharpen strategy and hold the business accountable to its own goals
  • Small wineries seeking to expand beyond DTC into distribution and retail channels without losing brand integrity

What Makes Us Different

Most consultants specialize in one tier, one channel, or one function. Mike Fine has spent five decades working in all of them — as a winery executive, a distributor leader, a retailer, and a brand builder. That breadth of experience is rare. The ability to apply it all at once, to your specific situation, is rarer still.
Fine Wine & Spirits 3T Consulting intentionally works with a limited number of clients at any given time — ensuring every engagement receives Mike's full attention, expertise, and commitment. This is not a volume practice. There are no junior associates, no hand-offs, and no templated solutions.
When you work with Fine Wine & Spirits 3T Consulting, you get Mike — his experience, his network, his judgment, and his complete focus on your business.
The goal is not to be another vendor on your roster. The goal is to be the most valuable advisor in the room.

How Mike Operates

  • Disciplined. Measurable. Accountable.

  • Growth built on structure and honest assessment — not hope, not hype, and not promises that don't survive contact with the market. Mike brings the same operating discipline to every client engagement that he developed running companies at every level of the wine and spirits business.

  • Mutually aligned, realistic goals, targets, and strategic planning built around your actual business — not an idealized version of it.
  • Budgets grounded in market reality and achievable growth — no hockey stick projections
  • Monthly reporting, quarterly reviews, and annual planning that keep the business honest and on track
  • Clear accountability structures so everyone knows what success looks like and how to measure it.
  • Straight talk — Mike will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear

Mike's Values

A true advisory partner — not just another vendor.
Mike operates with a simple mindset: alignment, transparency, and honest counsel. That means doing the right work, in the right markets, with the right clients — while protecting brand equity, maintaining margin discipline, and driving profitable, sustainable growth.
Mike takes on a limited number of clients because the quality of the relationship matters more than the size of the roster. Every engagement is built on trust, straight talk, and a genuine commitment to your success — not just the next invoice.

Founding & Managing Partner

Mike Fine FWS 3T Consulting

Mike is a third-generation wine and spirits professional with five decades of leadership experience across all three tiers of the U.S. beverage industry. He is recognized for building high-performing sales organizations, developing successful retail concepts, and driving national supplier growth through disciplined distributor management and strategic execution.
With deep family roots in the business — his father served as President of Paul Masson Vineyards and his grandfather worked for Jim Beam following Prohibition — Mike has built a career spanning distributor leadership, retail entrepreneurship, and supplier-side national management.

Career Highlights

  • Mike Fine — Career Highlights

  • Mike began his career at Seagram's, where he was selected for the elite SMIDRP Executive Training Program — one of the most rigorous sales leadership programs in the industry. After traveling the wine world from 1984 to 1986, he returned to build one of the most complete careers in the American wine and spirits business.

  • Retail — Founder & Operator
  • Founded Sportsman's Fine Wines & Spirits in February 1987, building it into a six-unit operation — retail stores, wine bars, a bistro, and a private wine storage facility — that became Arizona's highest-grossing independent wine and spirits business. Earned Arizona Business Magazine's "Best of Arizona" ten times and New Times "Best of Phoenix" nineteen consecutive years.

  • Wholesale — Distributor Leadership
  • Joined Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits following the sale of Sportsman's, building deep expertise in multi-market sales execution, distributor performance management, and field leadership across some of the most competitive markets in the country.
Mike Fine
  • Supplier — National Sales Leadership

  • C. Mondavi & Family — Regional Manager → National Director of Retail Chains

  • Truett Hurst Inc. — National Sales Manager, driving national expansion for the publicly traded company

  • Smith Family Wines — VP Sales & Marketing → Winery General Manager

  • Girasole Vineyards — VP Sales

  • Penrose Hill / First Leaf — VP Sales, the largest wine club in the United States

  • Fresh Vine Wine — EVP/Senior Executive, contributing to the company's public offering in December 2021

  • Consulting — Fractional Leadership
  • Mike founded Bona Fide Wine & Spirits and Invictus Wine & Spirits, specializing in fractional winery management and national sales consulting — the direct precursor to Fine Wine & Spirits 3T Consulting. This work established his approach as a fractional executive for the wine industry, providing experienced leadership that scales with each client's needs.

  • Importer — President
  • From January 2023 through the end of 2025, served as President of MDCV USA, managing the import and North American market development of French wine portfolios including the Cordier and Provence Rosé Group brands.

Core Strengths

  • Three-tier strategy and navigation across supplier, wholesale, and retail/restaurant channels
  • Fractional advisory leadership and scalable business planning for wine and spirits operators
  • Distributor relationship management and channel development across all U.S. markets
  • Retail strategy and operations for online and brick-and-mortar wine and spirits businesses
  • Beverage program design and wine list development for restaurants and wine bars
  • DTC expansion strategy for small wineries seeking distribution and retail placement
  • Excess and library inventory solutions through established trade channels
  • Back office oversight including financial management, bookkeeping, and operational systems
  • Business plan writing for operators seeking funding, investment, or strategic clarity
  • Brand positioning and go-to-market planning across all classes of trade

Personal Life

Mike lives in Phoenix, Arizona and is the proud father of three children. Outside of work, he enjoys sailing, surfing, hiking, weight training, and has been a competitive mountain and road cyclist for over 40 years.
Today, Mike Fine leads Fine Wine & Spirits 3T Consulting as an adult beverage industry consultant with a singular mission: helping wineries, retailers, and restaurants grow profitably through five decades of hard-won operator experience, three-tier strategic counsel, and the kind of honest, disciplined advisory partnership that moves businesses forward.
CALL TO ACTION
Guiding brands through complexity, and always open to meaningful conversation as the U.S. adult beverage industry evolves. Whether you’re launching, expanding, or repositioning, FWS3T Consulting delivers the leadership and execution needed to scale profitably across the U.S. market.