GARAGE VINO

Remember when I penned an entry entitled “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Custom Crush”? I had just met with Randy Pace at the Terravant Winery, a custom-crush facility in Buellton, in the Santa Ynez Valley, and placed a tentative order for a ton of Zinfandel for the 2008 harvest season as either a custom-crush (i.e., wholesale) or alternating-proprietor (i.e., retail) wine client. This was February or so of last year. Then, if you recall, I stumbled across an opportunity to run the creative wing of a production company an old friend of mine had recently acquired. Being a writer and sometime creative executive by trade, at least as evidenced by the past 15 years, the opportunity was hard to pass up – particularly given the fact that it has taking me nearly four years to complete my new novel, the additional fact that the economy had begun to sour, and finally that we all know, at least all seven of you reading this blog know, that I aspire to launch a winery…and at least some capital is required to do so!

Day jobs being what they are, and as you can tell based on the total lack of content on garagevino.com from March onward, I got insanely busy for a while. We were the new management team coming aboard a company that’s been around for a while, and we were bringing in new staff, etc. – lot of work, plus I drive from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica daily to do so.

Meaning I never did get around to completing my application process for the California state (ABC) equivalent of the TTB Basic Permit, which allows you to custom-crush and buy and sell wine as a wholesaler here in California.

Nonetheless, I was in the process of procuring the Chili Bu Sangiovese and Dr. Mark’s Santa Ynez Valley Syrah, and ran across a grower’s listing on winebusiness.com for Nebbiolo. A Barolo was the best wine I remember tasting, so I’ve aspired to make one. I thought, since I was already making some Sangiovese and Syrah in the garage, that I’d at least place a call and see whether my tardy permit-application process might possibly be resurrected in time to make some Nebbiolo under a professional license…thereby going pro once and for all.

Randy Pace at Terravant passed me off to Alan Phillips, the head winemaker, and we talked about working out a deal where they’d give me the “founder’s discount” – a reduced rate for the inaugural winemakers involved with Terravant’s first harvest season – on a ton of fruit crushed at the winery.

One key benefit of Terravant’s business model is that the majority of the permitting fees and process, handled through a partnership with a company called Compli (based in Paso Robles), are included in your per-case rate as a custom-crush or AP client at the winery.

Final note: it’s only about a $1,200 difference to go with the AP permit, thereby being an actual winery (of which there are 25 others at Terravant) entity sharing the winemaking premises on an “alternating” basis…versus simply being a custom crush client. The AP version allowing you to sell your wine as a retail wineseller, not just wholesale to stores and restaurants etc. Anyway it turns out Terravant and Compli was able to handle my order of a ton of Nebbiolo, with the permitting process to be completed as we went. Any failure in the permitting process would mean that Terravant would own my wine, but given the fact I already had a TTB Basic Permit, I figured it was worth the risk and we’d be able to get it done. Terravant has a monthly payment plan which makes life easier as well.

We customized the plan for my Nebbiolo:

• Crush into 1.5-ton bin with dry-ice chips
• Five-day cold soak
• Fermentation with RC-212 yeast in open-top 1.5-ton bin
• Addition of enzyme to assist in breaking down the skins
• Seven-day extended maceration (daily CO2 gassing)
• Press to stainless steel tank
• 72-hour settling period
• Rack to French oak barrels
• Top-off every 2 weeks
• 18 months minimum barrel aging

In this way I believed I would be getting just about every molecule of flavor and intensity out of those skins. Enough people say that you can’t make a Barolo-type Nebbiolo from California grapes that even I was starting to believe it…but a few producers, such as Palmina, do Nebbiolo pretty well, and I suspect the reason much of the Nebbiolo made here isn’t so fantastic is that the winemakers don’t go for it. Barolo, at least most of it, is a big wine that requires a lot of aging…and Nebbiolo is a think-skinned fruit. I figured that by extracting every last bit of tannin and flavor from the grapes I was getting, I’d have as big and intense a Nebbiolo as the fruit would allow.

We settled on our fees, began the permitting process (very intense set of questionnaires, bank statements, evidence of social security number, all that jazz), and began waiting for my new friend Bob Howard’s vineyard to get those grapes ripe and ready to crush.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 8:34 am and is filed under Winemaking, Starting Out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.