WHY DRINK BETTER? 

Drink Better is a drinks agency inspired by the family farm.

We celebrate the work of generations of committed grape growers, winemakers, distillers, botanists, and agronomists – and we share their work with you.

Our portfolio highlights fiercely independent businesses who hold on tight to tradition while also embracing sound technological innovation. These partners manage their companies and their land with respect and integrity, and using minimal intervention, to produce wines and spirits with real character.

It is our mission to showcase farms and families, not factories – and promote the purchase of better wines and spirits in the Ontario market. Better quality, better tasting, better for the environment, better for local economies around the world. That’s the ‘better’ in DRINK BETTER. We'll focus on organic, biodynamic, and other sustainable systems, while delivering the most delicious small production wines and spirits from Canada and beyond.

ABOUT KARI

Every person who loves wine has that moment or that bottle that sucked them in. For Kari, who didn’t really grow up around quality wine, it was a bottle of Tokaji Aszú from her birth year, tasted in Tokaj on a tour when she was a Rotary Club exchange student in Hungary in the early 1990s. The wine itself probably wasn’t that amazing (if she’s being honest about the bottles from that period), but it represented something about wine that she hadn’t previously known: that a wine could taste so much of its place, that it was steeped in so much tradition and history, and that it could sweep you so completely off your feet. It was the start of something, even if at 18 she had no idea what that was.

It would be years later (after decades in the advertising business) that she’d consider her place in the wine business, having been only a buyer and collector of wine since that magical day in Tokaj, building up her collection and her knowledge as her budget allowed. Getting to know so many people in Ontario wineries over the past 15 years demonstrated that wine could be a rewarding, albeit tough, slog – and she looked for a way in.

In 2014 she found it, while tasting through the offerings in the Slow Wine salon at the biennial Slow Food Terra Madre event in Torino, Italy. She liked how the Slow Food philosophy of Good, Clean, and Fair, that she was already an active part of, translated into the wine world. She knew that if she was going to be in the wine business it would have to mirror her beliefs about eating, since wine and spirits are agricultural products, too. It’s important to Kari to connect her customers to the lands where wine grows.

She joined classes in both the wine business and in sommellerie, and worked for a few import agencies while she learned the business and continues to learn today. She left her full-time job in advertising in 2017. Thanks in part to the friendly sommeliers who knew her first as a customer and gave her a chance to sell to them, she got her start. Much to her surprise, she loves working in sales, which is great because she’s far too clumsy to be a sommelier.

Late in 2018, Drink Better was born.

Today, Kari is building her business from the ground up with likeminded sommeliers, wine directors, winemakers, and distillers. If you’re looking for representation or would like to taste our portfolio, please contact Kari at kari@drinkbetter.ca or at 647.534.6362.