GARAGE VINO

…Make that a couple of funny things. If you’ve been following along (that means you, Mom), I recently took a meeting with Randy Pace, general manager of the Terravant Wine Company, now in the final phase of construction of their impressive custom crush facility in Buellton, California. With my basic wholesaler permit application off to the feds, a phone interview behind me, I knew that I needed a decision on the location where I’d be doing my custom crush (for both the federal and state permits). Since Terravant will be the closest option for me and they essentially have no minimum order size, I figured it would fit my needs just right.

Come to find out Randy and company definitely know what they’re doing and are truly set up to serve the winemaker. The blueprints for the facility being built are impressive, and virtually every option you might consider for every varietal you might haul in can be outlined, chosen, planned, and stored. Randy and I set up a theoretical order for a ton of Zinfandel, assuming delivery in a refrigerated rental truck from Sonoma County just for the hell of it. Having learned from some of my err-on-the-side-of-caution decisions on my 2007 garage Zin, I selected all kinds of cool, push-the-envelope options for the winemaking — 5-day cold soak, 1-week extended maceration, and so on. The price that emerged was fairly reasonable considering the puny size of my theoretical order — after you count the costs of a couple of barrels and related stuff I’d be responsible for, I’d be paying $9-10 a bottle, all in, including tax and so on. Presuming I’m able to avoid screwing the wine up, that’s $9 a bottle, including storage costs and all, for ultrapremium Zinfandel that ought to taste like a $30 bottle of wine or better.

Learned another interesting fact too — all the more relevant if you’ve been following the garagevino adventure — which is that aside from the one-time $1200 filing fee I’d need to pay the compliance consulting firm, an Alternating Proprietorship license/contract will cost me the exact same as a Custom Crush arrangement…and as an AP, you’re actually a winery, meaning you can sell retail, not just wholesale. You can host tasting dinners, pour at promotional or charity events, and, in the case of Terravant, you have the opportunity to occupy some shelf space in the multi-label tasting room they’re setting up on-site. Anyway, it’s a big step forward in the business model, at virtually no incremental cost: selling that $9 bottle of wine, make that $10 with the permitting costs, looks a lot better when you get $30 for it, rather than $15, which you’d get from a store that sells it for $30 and pockets the difference. You’d get less than the $15, probably, from a distributor. So options certainly open up if you go this route, no matter how small you’re starting out.

However.

Did I mention that a couple of things happened on the way to the custom crush?

Here’s the first thing. It’s that in my quest to “go pro,” I’ve now reached the starting line in the professional winemaking sense…but something occurred to me as I began to outline the decisions I’d make with the wine with the winemaking staff. What occurred to me was, first, that I am going to need to sell this wine. The second realization was that I wouldn’t really be making it — I’d be operating like a film director on a big-budget shoot, where the cinematographer oversees the lighting and camera decisions, the camera operator exposes the film, the set designer puts the look together…rather than the way an auteur would work, doing it all himself in a hands-on way.

The third realization was that I’d now found myself significantly down a road that might, my gut began to tell me, have been a wrong turn to begin with.

Let’s go back for a second to the opening entry of this site. I established pretty clearly that I’m in this to become a vigneron. An artisan grape-grower and winemaker, consolidated by that convenient definition of vigneron: “winegrower.” I then walked through the old adage about needing the big fortune to make a small one in wine, what I have at my disposal being less than a large fortune at the moment, but that the opportunity to pursue winemaking professionally, and for profit, still exists, sans fortune, if you are willing to follow more of the “microbrewery” model, where you don’t own the hops, barley, and related crops…or in this case, grapevines. You just buy the grapes and make the wine.

And in the past six months I’ve bought some grapes. I’ve made some wine…at least got it into barrels, at any rate. I served as a harvest slave in an ultrapremium winery where they follow my business model to a T: Craig Jaffurs buys Syrah and other Rhone varietals from phenomenally farmed vineyards in Santa Barbara county but makes his wine and sells it from a location right in downtown Santa Barbara. Turns out to be a growing trend: the “urban winery.”

All of which is well and good. And if you follow Craig’s path, and that of many others, the custom crush leading to the alternating proprietorship leading to the owned or leased winery facility has worked before, and could work for me. I’ve even figured out how to skip the first step.

But when I’ve got this opportunity in front of me to custom-crush, or “AP” some wine — or let me put it this way — the farther along I get down this route, the more I realize, down at the gut level, that I don’t want to be “just” a winemaker.

I’m not in this, I’ve realized, or confirmed, or remembered, to buy other growers’ grapes and make wine. I need to learn how to make wine, and make it well, so that when I do make some from my own grapes, I will know what I’m doing, or at least know how not to fuck things up.

But when I mentioned that all great businesses truly begin in the garage, one thing I neglected to mention about those businesses was the other essential ingredient: passion. In fact, passion is, in my opinion, the most important ingredient in anything. Hard work matters, for instance, but passion is what drives you to keep at it and work hard to take your vision to completion. A good business plan might matter too — but show me someone doing something true to their heart, and you can show me a thousand business plans — none of them will matter compared to what that person operating from the heart is going to accomplish. He’ll find a way, and it will probably be the best of all the business plans because of where he’s coming from.

And what I realized, driving home from Buellton, armed with costs, winemaking options, and license-application information…the same thing I’ve come to realize after spending some time with other winemakers, from Craig Jaffurs and Dave Yates to Steve Clifton…I’ve realized that yes — I do want to make some wine, and to try a few varietals to really learn how to do it right…

But the way I’m going to succeed at this is to follow my original vision — and that is to find my little plot of land, preferably in some beautiful corner of California like Dry Creek Valley in Healdsburg, and grow and make my own wine on my own terms in my own time. That vision might not be a moneymaker from the outset; it might never be that. It might just be a hobby. And I’m not going to live up there permanently; we live in Santa Barbara, and we love it. Finally, I have some ways of making some good money — right now, maybe not enough to plunk down 20% and get financed on a $3 million second home, which is what a Dry Creek Valley property would cost me — but soon I might be able to do something like that. And if duly motivated…maybe it’ll come sooner.

Which brings me to a new orientation on the winemaking front:

It isn’t about “going pro” just yet. Or ever, frankly. It’s about the dream — and making the dream happen. In the meantime, I need to make some wine and make a few different kinds. Do I decide to do so under a licensed banner, so I can sell it, rather than just drink it and give it away to friends? It’s possible. It’s worth considering.

But ultimately, I think I’m going to continue doing the garage vino thing, switching from Zinfandel to Merlot or Cab or Nebbiolo or some other favorite of mine this fall, maybe trying a couple of them, and learning a little more about how to do it right…without the pressure of trying to “turn pro” or making money at it. Because, frankly, I’m not interested in being a winemaker per se, nor am I interested in being a wine salesman per se. I’m a writer, and have often been a producer and executive, and maybe, goes my new orientation, I should focus my moneymaking efforts in those more profitable places, and find my little slice of land before long and tinker with my grapes and wine the way I envision it, rather than trying to force a business atop a hobby prematurely, or unnaturally.

Long story short, and along the lines of the way life usually works, it just so happens as I made this realization, or remembering, that an old friend of mine gave me a call. His company has just acquired an entertainment firm in Hollywood — my old “day job” world — and the timing of it, vis a vis my other realizations, was almost uncanny.

It seems I’ll soon have the opportunity to focus my efforts on doing what I’ve done best over the years and, if all goes well, be rewarded for those efforts in a capacity that might just be sufficient to fund the purchase of that slice of vineyard land some year soon.

Does all this mean I’ll pull the plug on the “going pro” side of things? Not sure — if I’m tinkering with small lots of wine, maybe there’s nothing wrong with having that wine be something a friend of mine could buy from me. It isn’t about pro or not pro, is the point. The point is my focus. I am going to continue to tinker with winemaking and grow better at it…but it will all be in service of attaining the part I’m passionate about — the opportunity to become that vigneron I aspire to be.

To do that, when I can, as opposed to placing the square peg of a prematurely commercial wineselling business in the round hole of my winegrowing passion, now, seems like a much better way of livin’ to me.

All this said, what do you think just came in the mail? My wholesaler’s permit. I’m street legal, at least with the feds, to make my wine via custom crush. While I stock up some dough to be able to buy some land, why not tinker partly in the garage, partly at Terravant?

More to come.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 3:52 pm 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.