From Wilbur’s to Wyatt’s, Dinsmore toasts success

LONGMONT — A Northern Colorado business is hoping to reproduce a successful formula, mixing wet goods and whimsy.

Dennis Dinsmore, along with partner Scott Robinson, just opened Wyatt’s Wine and Spirits in the new Village at the Peaks outdoor mall in Longmont. But Dinsmore has been in the adult-beverage industry for the better part of four decades.

“I started at a restaurant in Fort Collins when I was in college in the early ‘70s,” Dinsmore said. “I was a waiter and then went to their management training program, was a bar manager and then floor manager and kitchen manager.”

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All the while, he was studying to be an electrical engineer, a career that never came to be. A job with a wine distributor led to another as the wine manager at a retail outlet in Denver and then a marketing position with a vineyard in California.

After going on to work for companies such as Nestlé, Schieffelin and Guinness, he returned to Fort Collins to open his own place.

“There was an old store in town called Beverage Nation, and the owner had a concept of only carrying really fine wines,” Dinsmore said. “Fort Collins doesn’t support just that. We also like our everyday beverages, so when he faltered we bought him out in the fall of 2000.”

When it came to picking a name for the new business, the process was decidedly low tech. They were looking for something that would be both fun and marketable, and after a few martinis they began leafing through a book of baby names. When they came across “Wilbur,” Dinsmore said everyone started laughing. It turns out Dinsmore had a friend named Lee, sort of.

“His real name was actually Wilbur Lee, but he hated Wilbur. So I was laughing because it was Lee’s real name, that he hated. My son Matt was laughing because there was Wilbur in ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and my partner Scott Robinson was laughing because he remembered Mister Ed, the talking horse.” The palomino in the 1960s television comedy series would drawl the first name of his owner, Wilbur Post.

It was unanimous. With that kind of recognition, they quickly settled on Wilbur’s Total Beverage.

Fast forward about a dozen years, when Dinsmore said he was approached by one of his customers to consider opening a store a few miles to the south. That customer was Allen Ginsborg, managing director of NewMark Merrill Mountain States, who was in the process of developing Village at the Peaks in Longmont. “He liked the way we did business at Wilbur’s and felt we would not only prosper but be an asset to the development,” Dinsmore said.

To Ginsborg, it made perfect sense.

“They offer quality and variety,” he said. “There’s really nothing similar in Boulder County. … I felt there was a void in the market.”

The request prompted Dinsmore and his partner to take a serious look at Longmont.

“I saw a lot of parallels to Fort Collins,” he said. “It’s a growing market, it has a lot of highly educated people and the disposable per capita income is fairly high,”

Additional investigation led the two to conclude that a substantial number of residents were traveling to Boulder to make alcohol purchases. Dinsmore felt that was because the local liquor stores were under-serving the population.

“They just didn’t have the selection, and I don’t think they have the level of service that our business model provides,” he said, “so we did some more due diligence and decided it made sense to come here.”

As further proof of the location’s viability, Dinsmore pointed to the fact that Whole Foods, his next-door neighbor at Village at the Peaks, has decided to increase the size of its original facility by about 30 percent. “After taking a look at their research, they felt the market was strong enough to make a much bigger store here,” he said.

Ginsborg thinks it’s a great pairing. “With Whole Foods as a co-tenant, the two businesses support each other very well. It just seems natural to have food and wine side by side.”

As for Wilbur’s, it was left in the hands of family members. When the time came to choose a name for the new store, Dinsmore and his partner went back to the book of baby names.

“When we saw how incredibly popular the name ‘Wyatt’ was in the ‘90s and realized all those young men were just about 21 years old now, we figured we could have a ball with it, so off we went.”