Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants Opens New Winemaking Facility
June 21st, 2018
Cooper’s Hawk Winery and Restaurant in Oak Lawn, Illinois.
Tim McEnery, founder and CEO, Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants
The unique Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants chain, founded in 2005 by CEO Tim McEnery, includes four distinct components – an upscale casual dining restaurant, a full-service bar, private barrel-aging room and a Napa-style tasting room and retail gift shop.
The restaurants provide a modern, casual dining experience with warm hospitality in an inviting upscale setting. The culinary team has designed a contemporary American menu infused with flavors from around the world. Each dish is made fresh from scratch in their kitchen incorporating peak-of-season ingredients and listed with a bin number to guide you to your selection’s perfect wine match.
The tasting rooms and retail shops embrace the rich experience of Napa, providing guests the opportunity to explore and expand their palates and enrich their wine journey. High-end decanters, wine accessories and gifts, along with our very own gourmet food line, are offered, which allow guests to live the Cooper’s Hawk lifestyle at home.
The tasting room in the Oak Lawn restaurant.
The star of the show of Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants is the wine. Expanding and relocating the winery to Woodridge, Illinois to the new state-of-the-art winery nearly tripled the size of its former facilities and is designed to keep pace with the company’s rapid growth and their 300,000+-member Wine Club. All this is accomplished while maintaining stringent standards for quality. The Club, growing at an annual rate of 25 percent, offers members 12 limited-production specialty blends each year, created exclusively for them. Members pick up their monthly wines at a Cooper’s Hawk restaurant location, which allows them to stay fully engaged with the brand.
The bar area at the Oak Lawn restaurant.
“The winery is the lifeblood of the Cooper’s Hawk experience,” says Tim McEnery, Cooper’s Hawk CEO and founder. “While the new facility was designed to increase capacity, our primary focus is to maintain our hands-on approach to winemaking as we grow. This expansion enhances our ability to serve Wine Club members and guests by enabling continuous innovation while supporting collaborative wine-of-the-month initiatives with the world’s leading vineyards, winemakers and culinary taste-makers.”
The bar area in the St. Charles, Ill. location, with an incredible selection of wines.
The 125,000-square-foot winery supports an initial production capacity of approximately 685,000 cases, with significant room to grow, and includes a 60,000-square-foot warehouse that can store approximately 300,000 cases. The company’s wine output has increased by nearly 40 percent in the last three years, and has more than doubled since the former facility opened in Countryside, Illinois in 2010. The increased demand is owing to the opening of 30 restaurants in eight states over a span of 12 years, coupled with the related expansion of its Wine Club, which is the largest in the U.S.
