FEATURES | FLORIDA

Thatcher Baker-Briggs Came to Florida for the Wine. Then Came the Paperwork.

By Eric Barton | June 12, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

To bring some of the world’s most interesting wines to Florida, Thatcher Baker-Briggs first needed the blessing of the sewage company.

It was one of the more unexpected steps in getting Thatcher’s Imports licensed in the state, a process Baker-Briggs expected to be difficult but not quite this difficult. Requirements appeared that he hadn’t encountered in California, New York, or Illinois. The planned opening date slipped. Then it slipped some more.

“We planned for a certain timeline and it took roughly six months longer than expected to get fully operational,” he says.

Now Baker-Briggs has made it through Florida’s regulatory gauntlet. The Los Angeles-based sommelier built his reputation in Michelin-starred restaurants before becoming a trusted adviser to serious collectors and founding Thatcher’s Wine, which sources, sells, and imports bottles from some of the world’s most sought-after producers.

His latest move brings that expertise to restaurants across Florida, where he’s betting that independent restaurants are ready for an alternative to the enormous distributors whose sprawling catalogs can make wine lists look suspiciously alike.

Baker-Briggs at Thatcher’s Wine in Brentwood

Baker-Briggs arrived at that mission through the kitchen. He began cooking professionally as a teenager and worked at acclaimed restaurants including Coi in San Francisco before moving into wine. He passed the Court of Master Sommeliers’ certified sommelier exam at 22, then worked at Saison in San Francisco and Takazawa in Tokyo, where he became head sommelier. He later returned to Saison as director of service and beverage before launching Thatcher’s Wine Consulting in 2019.

Cooking, he says, trained him to understand wine long before he had the vocabulary to describe it.

“When you’re spending hours learning how ingredients interact, how to coax flavor out of something, your palate develops differently,” Baker-Briggs says. “By the time I was spending real time with wine, I already had a robust internal reference library of scents and flavors.”

That palate helped him build a business advising collectors and finding bottles that rarely turn up at the neighborhood wine shop. Thatcher’s Wine eventually expanded into retail and importing, with a focus that runs from coveted Burgundy and Champagne to emerging winemakers producing bottles within reach of people who don’t have a climate-controlled cellar.

Florida looked like the logical next move. Baker-Briggs knew chefs who were opening restaurants in Miami, while established dining scenes elsewhere in the state were showing a growing interest in serious wine. “The conversation around Miami is still catching up to what’s actually happening on the ground,” he says. “The demographic has shifted, and people genuinely want to drink at a high level.”

Thatcher's Wine Brentwood Los Angeles CA

The licensing process proved to be only the first obstacle. The larger challenge is competing with distributors carrying thousands of wines and spirits. A restaurant can order nearly everything it needs from one sales representative, an appealing option for operators without the time or staff to study every bottle.

Baker-Briggs and similar smaller distributors instead work with a focused collection of producers, visiting wineries, tasting from barrels, and learning the vineyards and people behind each bottle. That means smaller distributors can eliminate some of the markups added as a bottle passes through the traditional three-tier system. The result, ideally, is a restaurant paying less for a better wine and a diner discovering something beyond the labels available everywhere else.

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“We’re not overtly selling wine,” he says. “Our goal is to get great bottles in front of people, share the story about what makes them so special, and then let them make the decision.”

Five years from now, Baker-Briggs won’t measure the Florida expansion only by how many fashionable Miami restaurants carry his wines. He wants to see them poured at the old Florida institutions: the local, historic, multigenerational places that have survived changing neighborhoods, dining trends, and countless bottles of forgettable pinot grigio.

“If we can change what’s in the glass at those places,” he says, “we’ve done something real, and not just added a line to someone’s portfolio.”