GARAGE VINO

Let me say up-front that I have no idea what the hell I’m doing trying to start a winery. Wait — strike that, reverse it — as Yoda tells us…Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. And so I start over…

…saying up-front that I have no idea what the hell I’m doing starting a winery.

A winery? Don’t you need, as the tiresome old saying goes, a “large fortune to make a small fortune” in the wine industry? I don’t have a large fortune — hell, I don’t even have a small one.

How about family connections — maybe a long, multigenerational tradition of winemaking? Well, my dad, brother, and I all drink a great deal…

Or a graduate degree in viticulture — even horticulture — you’ve got at least that, don’t you, Will?

Nope.

But wait a minute. This is all beginning to sound familiar. I’ve tried a few things in my life. A few challenging things — occasionally very challenging in some cases — and the thing is, it’s always the same. People tell you, and it’s easy to believe them when they say it, that if you don’t have the moolah, or the connections, or you don’t have some way in that Dude Normal could never possibly possess — then there’s no way to do it. Wanna be an actor? Your name Newman or Redford? Then don’t even think about it — keep your day job in Nebraska. How about a news anchor? Play-by-play sportscaster? Cable television executive? Better have a graduate degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse, then. And did I just hear you say you want to write the great American novel? Or was is screenplay? You must be high. Just fuhgedaboudit, kid.

But we all know those preconceptions, or warnings, or whatever they are, are bullshit. You can do whatever the hell you want — even if you have no idea what the hell you’re doing in the industry you’re struck by this passion to get into. It might not seem this way at first, but when that spark keeps flaring at the side of your brain, it just ain’t gonna take no for an answer — and isn’t that what makes you make it happen?

Sorry for the Oprah-esque dip into spiritual self-help there, but here’s the thing: my passion, late in life though it has arrived to greet me each day, is to lead the life of the vigneron. (Definition for those taking the Garage Vino Ten-Minute Viticulture Course, the benefits thereof, however limited, I certainly never had at my disposal — per Merriam-Webster online: vi·gne·ron - pronunciation: “vEn-y&-’rOn - function: noun - etymology: Middle English (Scots), from Middle French, from Old French vineron, from vine, vigne vine, vineyard: WINEGROWER.)

Notice the one-word definition is winegrower — not grapegrower. I love that distinction — it implies, suggests, connotates, blatantly describes the whole process, not just the farming, or the barrel-aging, or the marketing of the wine. The tasks, from vine cutting to mouthfeel, are one. As Spike Lee is to his movies (AKA “joints”), a vigneron is to his wine. The filmmaking auteur writes, directs, and produces his film based on his own idea — as the vigneron plants his vines, farms his grapes, ferments their juice, and crafts the finished wine in a single continuous artistic flow. He, or she, is the auteur of wine. The writer-director-producer-editor-composer. Robert Rodriguez, Clint Eastwood, and Orson Welles all rolled into one . . . not that Orson Welles plus anyone else equals one person, of course.

But you get my drift.

Vigneron as artist. Creator. Auteur. To that, I aspire.

But how to proceed, particularly without the benefit of the bucks of the Hilton clan, or anything more than a single distance-learning class at UC Davis?

This question, I’ll answer in three ways.

First, a friend of mine recently remarked that all great entrepreneurs started their businesses in their garage. And it’s true: Wozniak and Jobs, Allen and Gates — the list goes on. You think Big Bill would have been more likely to create Microsoft had he not dropped out of Harvard to start his software empire in the garage?

Well guess what I recently did — I rented my east coast house to a great couple, packed my family of five up, shipped the whole gang to California on Jet Blue, and rented a small place on the Central Coast, near both beach and wine country — a place small enough, incidentally, that my office, the place I’m writing this opening blog right now, has to be in the garage. And I like it out here.

Second, the modern wave of boutique winemaking, as I understand it, began with a small group of cottage-style winemakers bucking the huge-vineyards, industrial trend in France in the 1980s, and them guys called themselves garagistes. Making their wines in small lots…in their garages or equivalent rooms. So here I am, in my garage — and I’m not French. So I called my website Garage vino . . . respecting the French tradition but going with Italian in the title since my wife and kids are quite Italian in fact.

Third, and perhaps most important, is a question I will answer the above question with. A question I thought of when I realized I couldn’t afford those properties in Dry Creek Valley, or Santa Ynez, or Sonoma, that I’d been spying on via Google Earth and Realtor.com:

If you’re starting a microbrewery — a garage beer, so to speak — do you begin by going out and buying vast fields of hops and barley crops?

In the answer to this last question, of course, lies the business plan I have just embarked upon.

Of course you don’t; you buy the ingredients and you make the beer in small lots and sell to a (hopefully) loyal set of customers. And if you’re launching a winery? Sure, I’d like to have rolling vineyards of Syrah, Zinfandel, Cabernet, Grenache, Viognier, a small experimental patch of Nebbiolo. I’d even like to have a cavernous winery facility hidden among the oaks, with a tasting room to die for or get married at while everyone who visits purchases my wine because the view’s so picturesque.

But as we discussed, I don’t have the dough for that.

So here’s what I’m doing — and here’s why I’m blogging the sordid tale of the coming adventure. I’m taking the garage-vigneron concept one notch further than the microbrewery strategy. I’ll argue, in fact, that I’m taking this premise as far as it can possibly be taken in the wine industry. Here is my business plan, or my credo, or my outline (even though Stephen King says that outlines are for novelists who really just want to write non-fiction):

I am going to start very small — maybe 50 cases small.
I’m going to buy organically grown, super-low-yield grapes from one of my favorite California appellations.
I’m going to work with a custom-crush facility near my home here on the Central Coast.
I will find the best winemaker I can find, and pay or trade for his/her services as a consulting winemaker for my small quantity of grapes.
I’ll rent the climate-controlled barrel storage space and continue to consult with my winemaker as I become increasingly involved in the process.
In the meantime, I will pursue and get (try not, do or do not, there is no try) a wholesale wineselling license, and sell my 50-case first batch of fine California wine to friends, local restaurants, and/or to wineclub members I can coax into joining my mailing list (I’ll worry about the wholesale vs. retail details later).

And finally, and perhaps most important — most important only once the wine I make turns out to be excellent, powerful, and highly drinkable — because I will be making it so that people can drink it, so it must be marketed –

I will tell the story of every step of this venture of mine on this blog site, and I will make a documentary film following my adventures in launching the winery, snippets of which I will post as video blogs along the way on this site too.

That’s it — there’s my concept in a nutshell — the outline for the coming true California adventure that lies ahead for me and my family.

Wanna follow along? I’d love to have you. One of the ways I’ve been able to learn anything, if I’ve learned anything at all, is through the incredible winery blogs and viticulture journals posted online at great winery sites from all over the place. Winemakers and grape-growers love to tell their stories, and their stories are never dull, and sometimes fantastic and inspiring — and usually loaded with all kinds of info on how they succeeded, failed, cultivated, fermented, or marketed their wine.

So I’m going to share everything — every damn detail of what I assume will not be an easy process, but will always be challenging and mostly be enjoyable. I intend to build this site into a more compelling interactive experience as I go — in the auteur’s spirit, I just taught myself how to register this domain name, buy server space, and use WordPress and TextEdit on my PowerBook to launch this site, so it isn’t exactly a multimedia bonanza just yet. But I will get there for anyone who drops by in a week, or a month, or a year from now. I hope to always have something new to check out.

Among my plans are to involve readers, assuming I have any besides my parents, in the process of deciding on a name for the winery, the design on the label, and any of a number of other pieces to the emerging puzzle.

I also hope to give back as much as I can — by featuring interviews with great winemakers, growers, winery owners and skilled employees thereof, the marketers, the bloggers…and by including links to all the great sites I’ve stumbled across in my vain hunt for enough information to avoid making any more mistakes than I have to in crafting my first vintage.

And in the end, I will confess that I want it all — I’d like this little garage winery of mine to buy some of those rolling hills of vines, the cavernous winery, the fabulous tasting room with views to rival Tuscany’s. A spot where people can muse, find inspiration, hold life-changing events…and buy my wine, too.

In the meantime, I do have a day job I’ve got to get back to. As you might have known, or guessed from this ultra-wordy first entry on GARAGEVINO.COM, I’m a novelist, screenwriter, producer, and a few other things most people warned me away from (and generally told me I could never do for a living).

You can check out my author website via the link on the sidebar of this site, or find my books on Amazon, the big-name bookstores, and numerous mystery and independent shops.

Or just come on back here in a bit to check on the progress of my quest.

And there you have it — this joint is operational!