GARAGE VINO

Bob Blamire helped me clean bins. I felt as though I nearly owed him my life at this point. I do like cleaning those things — you know how clean you get ‘em if you do ‘em yourself — but I now understand why Dave Yates, assistant winemaker at Jaffurs, offered me a few bottles of wine last year during my harvest-slave month: it’s quite a luxury to be relieved of your bin-cleaning duties when you’re used to shouldering most of that load yourself. Even at my scale.

Soccer practices and a few other things held us up for a minute — the grapes keeping cool in their half-ton bin in the back of the truck, parked in my driveway (neighbors wondering, are the Staegers moving already? Just got here a year ago)…and getting grapes from the bin, through the garage, and to the only place where I could operate the crusher-destemmer, proved a major endeavor.

I need a space to make this wine for real — that, I assure you, I will have by next year.

But then the hand-cranking crush began…and people started showing up from all corners of our ‘hood. Good thing too — I swear I had a crew four times the size of the professional, paid gang working their way through 7 tons a day on some mornings last year at Jaffurs, and still it took us a good four, five hours and then some.
The crusher-destemmer worked pretty well. The grapes were ripe and gently affixed to the stems, and so there were some pieces of stem in the must and we did our best to pluck them out (another trick learned as harvest slave last year). I sulfited, about half what is typically recommended — I did a quarter teaspoon per 7-8 gallons instead of a half-teaspoon every 5 gallons as many suggest. I remember Craig Jaffurs not using any last year — he hates the stuff — just sprays a slight sulfite solution, and not much of it, on the surface of the bins as he puts them into cold storage. Working at home, giving the neighborhood kids a chance to stomp some of the grapes…I needed a little insurance and so I made sure to get a decent dose of sulfites in there.

The size, height, and nature of the crusher-destemmer, and I’m talking both the input and output side of it, just didn’t really work for any type of efficiency. The top was high enough so we had to pour grapes in from above, in food-grade trash-bin loads small enough to prevent us from dislocating a shoulder for the hoist. No forklift on my back patio… and the chute was too low for anything but a 5 or 10 gallon bucket to take the must into. This worked fine in the end — transferred from the bucketloads into the sterilized extra 4×4 half-ton bin Bob Modie had loaned me, keeping it covered with a plastic sheet and bungee cord just the way I’d learned as harvest slave last year.

Bucket by bucket, crank by crank, pitchforkful by pitchforkful, we got the 900 pounds of grapes destemmed, partially crushed (probably should have figured out the adjustment facets of the crusher in advance, but I didn’t, so plenty of the berries remained whole; again something notable from last year’s lessons was that Jaffurs had removed the crusher part of his crusher-destemmer and so I take it that, at least for Syrah, the way my little Ferrari of a hand-cranker machine worked was actually the best-adjusted setting in terms of degree of crushing)…out of the picking bin and into the fermentation bin.

Along the way, every kid got two long stretches of stomping in his or her own bin. What a blast — and what a tradition. We all felt as though we were in Tuscany, making the wine for the neighborhood for years to come…which, obviously, we were, except for the Tuscany part. Though the weather’s not so different there…

Somewhere along the way I ate a piece of pizza or two, and tasted some decent wine Nadine bought for the occasion. We even barrel-tasted my 2007 Zinfandel (French oak barrel — great; American barrel — not too far along and too “fakey oakey”), and I finally did get around to testing the Brix on the Sangiovese - 26.5. Pretty high — and pretty good. While I had neglected to buy the ph- and acid-testing equipment I will eventually stock on my garagevino shelves, I was told that Ariel, with the same grapes, tested between 3.4 and 3.6 ph depending on location (some hillside/top, some flat down near the bottom of hill). Good enough for me this time around. We’ll average mine out around 3.5 for this season’s winemaking reference. Want to let the grapes speak for themselves anyway, unless things taste totally off at some point.

Darkness arrived, bedtime for the kids came too, and at long last we had one empty bin and one ¾ full of must. Smelling delicious and looking ruby purple the way only red winegrape must does. The last of my comrades headed home, I cleaned, covered, and gassed (CO2) the fermentation bin, hosed things off, hid the two trash bins of stems behind the garage, then considered going to bed before realizing that since I wasn’t doing a cold soak — too big of a bin for me to keep cold with ice bags and a blanket — it was time to get the yeast going.

Mixed up a couple containers worth (you have to rehydrate the yeast in warm water, adding some nutrient mix like “Go-Ferm” and let it sit for 15 minutes) then dug some holes in the must and got a pair of patches started for the night. Closed things up, went to sleep, got up early and mixed the two starter spots around a little before going to work, then came back that night to discover the fermentation was already getting warmed up and moving right along.

Final challenge that arose, kind of a disappointing one for me: I started the fermentation late Wednesday night September 10, and had a business trip that would take me out of town from the 14th through the 18th. Greg Schlosser, neighbor and mensch, along with Bob Blamire, came through in the clutch and kept the two-a-day punchdowns going, handling it perfectly after the one afternoon of instruction I offered just before heading to the airport on Sunday. Sterilize the punch-down tool, mix in some “Superfood/DAP” powder to keep the fermentation going and reduce the potential for off odors from the sulfur on the skins of the grapes, pull off the plastic sheet, punch down the whole bin in some systematic way, rinse off the tool, wipe down the sides of the bin with a vodka-soaked rag, replace the sheet, and, early on, provide a little shot of gas just in case. Didn’t even need the gas by Sunday — put your head down close to the grapes and sniff, and you’ll understand why added CO2 just wasn’t necessary. Your nose hairs curl, your brain freezes up like you’ve got a Slurpee headache, and you know quite well how little oxygen exists on the surface of those grapes.

Now I’m back, and I had the pleasure of my first punchdown in four days, a mere 30 minutes after pulling into the driveway from the airport. Things are still going strong in there, getting juicier by the moment, or winier, I should say, but CO2 is still in effect and the grapes are warm and fermenting still, here on day 8. Longer the better — more gentle, more flavors extracted.

I’m planning to do with extended maceration what I couldn’t do with cold soaking — give it a few days on the skins once the primary fermentation is, well, primarily over. I’ve got my CO2 gas gun so I should be able to keep air off of the surface of those suckers for a week following completion of primary.

Then we’ll put my new press to use and my kids will know not only how to crush red wine grapes, how to punch down the cap, to clean a winery facility before and after…but how to press the fresh wine off the skins and move that young stuff into the tank.

Extended maceration and press, coming up in seven days or thereabouts.

Thus ends the Crush in the Hood 2008 — at least until the Syrah and Nebbiolo I’m seeking is ready to harvest and I try the whole process all over again with slightly smaller lots! Or maybe just the same size all over again…?

Bob Modie has grown his grapes carefully and done it himself. Guy’s sort of living my dream. 3-1/2 acre vineyard, planted in 2004, organically farmed, small crop last year, first full harvest this year. He shoot-thins, drops clusters, keeps the nets over the rows when the grapes are ripe enough to attract birds. His vineyard’s at the top and downslope of a hill, facing southwest, and to my semi-trained eye the soils look like sandy, loamy, limestone-ridden Bordeaux-esque earth. Can’t attest to the organic matter inside the stuff, but things looked to me, up on that hill, like water wouldn’t stick around long in that soil and the vines would struggle and strain to pump out the fruit. He let me take a close look at the vines and the fruit his crews were plucking from them, and the vines were healthy, the grapes fairly tightly bunched for Sangiovese, the clusters medium-sized, the grapes almost as small as blueberries. Mmeaning more skin vs. grape flesh, so more tannins and flavor. Sangiovese is known for a fairly thin skin so smaller grapes might lead to a bolder, more intense single-varietal wine without as much need to blend with Cab or Syrah to give it the robustness Sangiovese can lack.

It’s a cool morning and the clouds keep it cool while the half-ton bins of grapes come into Bob’s driveway two-by-two, aboard a trailer the harvest crew is picking and dumping into. I’m fortunate to be joined in my desire for Bob’s grapes with one of the premier winemakers in Santa Barbara county — turns out Ariel Lavie, owner-winemaker (along with his wife Angela) of La Vie Vineyards in Lompoc is there taking all of Bob’s fruit that I don’t. If this guy has chosen this fruit? I’m in luck. Stumbled across the right vineyard is what that means.

The first four bins get weighed on Bob’s new scale and head up onto Ariel’s truck. My bin totals out at 900 lbs., even with the grapes mounded as high as they’ll go. Ariel is running Bob’s forklift this morning — he’s an old cellar pro and could steer a forklift through a maze of grandma’s china in his sleep. He gets my bin into the back of my U-Haul truck, the grapes still cold from the chilly night, and Bob loans me a second bin to crush the grapes into — a bin I’ll also use for primary fermentation.

Then my neighbor, pal, and dad of my daughter’s best friend, Bob Blamire and I hit the road, slightly reticent and full of guilt for leaving one of the area’s top winemakers behind as the sun begins pounding down on the hillside (and the grapes on Ariel’s truck). I tell myself he knows what he’s doing — plus, he’s got a shorter drive than we do, let alone less prep time before the crush once the grapes arrive at his winery.

Guilt aside, my grapes are shielded from the hot Paso sun that by now has made its way through the cloud cover — the back of the truck keeps cool until we cross over the mountain range north of Pismo Beach and the marine layer welcomes us with noonish temperatures in the seventies.

Couple stops at stores to procure some things I’d forgotten I need (that happens, it seems, even to the old pros, not that I am one — you only do this once a year, so you forget some of the things you had down pat, after a few tons of crushing, eleven months ago, and seemingly need to learn the annual process all over again). After these stops I’m ready to test out my new crusher-destemmer.

This time, unlike last year, it won’t just be me, my dad, and a couple of squishes from my kids — seems my wife, who has a passion for family traditions (including the new ones we’ve established here in Paradise, AKA Santa Barbara), has, in the span of a few hours, managed to create an annual event that you can go ahead and call unexpected in a beachfront city community: the First Annual Mesa Neighborhood Crush!

AKA The Crush In The Hood.

Turns out I’d need the help…since, as I began this three-part tale, 900 lbs. of grapes is one hell of a load if you’re crushing and destemming the things with a hand-crank Italian device meant for a quarter of that quantity. Plus, I had to assemble the stand myself without the aid of instructions, and after a few cranks it would prove particularly wobbly.

And so, accompanied by more than few parents, a gang of kids, and my best Mesa pals — the wine and beer and lemonade flowing, the pizzas arrived and, following the Jaffurs-trained cellar-master/harvest-slave sterilization stage…the crush was ready to begin. Destined, perhaps, to take us on into the night…

Next…Part III of “The Crush in the Hood”!

900 pounds. Let me tell you, when you’re thinking in terms of cases, it sounds like a fairly acceptable quantity of grapes. Maybe 25 cases, give or take, right? A very small lot of handmade ultrapremium wine. But when it comes to crushing and destemming those suckers with a hand-crank Italian unit fresh from the home winemaking shop, perched unsteadily out on the patio behind your garage — man, that’s a lot of grapes.

Sangiovese grapes, in this case.

Having debated and discussed possibilities with Sonoma area growers for some time, I’ve ultimately become way too busy in the day gig to get myself all the way up there without losing so much of my family time that the kids would forget who I was. So I kept searching for a grower cultivating Sangiovese or Nebbiolo grapes in the Central Coast area — i.e. within driving distance — and stumbled across Bob Modie’s offering of Sangiovese in San Miguel. An excellent Lompoc winemaker named Ariel Lavie was taking the majority of the grapes from Bob’s 3-acre Indian River Valley vineyard, but Bob had half a ton he could spare. Perfecto.

I get the note that they’re comin’ in on a Wednesday morning — September 10. It’s a little hotter in the Paso Robles area than in Santa Barbara county, so the grapes were ready a couple weeks earlier than, say, the Syrah will be down here.

Two problems with this: harvest had snuck up on me, so I hadn’t bought any of the equipment I’d hoped to. So I wasn’t ready for whatever wine I was planning to make in the garage (as opposed to a commercial custom crush). Second problem…well, I work during the week.

No problem.

Issue one was solved by a Sunday afternoon visit, various kids in tow, to John Daume’s “Home Wine Beer and Cheese Making Shop,” in Woodland Hills (about 75% of the way from SB to LA). I did what I’ve fantasized about doing since last year and bought a crusher-destemmer, 79-gallon stainless steel tank, press, 30-gallon barrel, and all the fixins (RC-212 yeast, supplements, sulfite powder, citric acid, etc.). Wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t as much as a custom crush on the same amount of grapes either — and I get to keep using this stuff every year. Made sure to get everything covered - pitchfork to move grapes, elastic rope to hold the plastic on the fermentation bin, even rented a CO2 gas tank from Santa Barbara Ice Company to make sure I could keep oxygen off my freshly crushed fruit.

Issue number two…move some meetings, take a vacation day, rent a 10’ U-Haul truck…then get lucky and find a friend of mine, Bob Blamire, has Wednesdays off from the business he runs and wouldn’t mind heading up to San Miguel with me to take possession of the grapes.

Cut to a six a.m. departure in the U-Haul, a blast heading up the highway, and an 8:30 a.m. arrival in San Miguel…Indian River Valley, to be precise.

One thing I keep realizing, or remembering, about winemaking, is one of its greatest benefits: you need help doing everything, so the process results in some good times with friends.

Exactly what I had in store that day…all day long, in fact.

Next…Part II of “The Crush in the Hood”!

I believe I’ve settled my internal debate on whether to “go pro” for the 2008 harvest season. My musings conclude with a question: Why must the hobby and profession of winemaking be mutually exclusive?

It seems I have been caught in a false debate. Outside of the issue of cost, what’s the problem with doing both? Why drum up a false conflict? As the James Bond philosophy goes, you only live twice, so why not do what you can while you can? Why not start a winemaking & wineselling business — or as defined in my opening blog of this website, a winery, since a winery is a real, whether virtual or not, right? — why not get a winery launched now for a six thousand bucks when, in the course of your adventure, you’ve determined it to be all but impossible to start a regular old winery for less than $6 million?

Living in a coastal community in California, I see all of my neighbors spending a thousand bucks or more on a regular basis on recreation equipment. Surfboards, specialized paddle surfboards, high-end mountain bikes, kite-surfing gear, hang gliders. After learning all I’ve learned it in a mere eight months of the garagevino trek, why not drop a few grand into a business, most of which will just come off my taxes as a loss anyway, and throw in some hobby money to upgrade my home winemaking effort to continue that as well?

The answer to these questions is obvious. I suppose I merely had to allow time to have its effect — for the idea of “going pro” to feel like a natural move. When I conceived of the idea of launching a fully-licensed operation this fall it was a kind of declaration and maybe didn’t feel organic; now it does. And in a pursuit that requires two to three years to make the product, let alone grow the source that goes into the making of it – why not get started if you can afford to do it?

You only live twice.

Being a contrarian as well as a fan of superbly made single varietal Merlot, I am hoping that the owner of an organically farmed Merlot vineyard in Sonoma Valley, which I encountered by chance (and Google) will still extend to me the opportunity to procure a ton of his fruit this fall. With that Merlot I can enter into an alternating proprietorship business with the Terravant facility in the Santa Ynez Valley. Following the logic I’ve described in prior entries, for 1200 bucks or so — really no more than it would cost me to obtain a custom crush permit — I can become a retail winery. Albeit virtually or cohabitationally located.

I can then enjoy the decision on what grapes to use for crafting the 2008 garage vintage. I have the Zinfandel tradition going already and have the opportunity, if all goes as planned, to get some Sonoma Valley old-vine Zinfandel along with my Merlot. Or I might continue with some Paso Robles Zin, which is coming along nicely in my garage as we speak. But whether or not I do the Zinfandel thing, I’m certainly going to want to try something else, so maybe Sangiovese, or perhaps there’s a Syrah waiting for me in Santa Barbara County…although ideally, and this is really what I should do because it’s my passion along with Merlot, is Nebbiolo.

That’s the plan for now: commercial vineyard-designate 100% Sonoma Valley Merlot, maybe some more Zin, and hopefully my first batch of Nebbiolo in the garage.

Whenever you aspire to a distant, seemingly unattainable career, there is no better way to learn (other than offering your services on a “volunteer”/slavery basis) than to find great books on the subject of your interest. The magic of non-fiction books, in a field that you have no access to, is that such books, occasionally by way of a single poignant line, can deliver a kind of wisdom that you can’t find any other way.

The problem with some fields is that they haven’t necessarily become popular enough as to make the kind of books that would help you readily accessible.

I found this to be the case in the late 1980s and early 90s when I was aspiring to become a working screenwriter. Today, head on in to your average bookstore and not only will you find dozens of books on the subject — you’ll typically find a whole section dedicated to the genre. Back then there wasn’t a single tome in stock that could serve to enlighten: how did you go about selling your idea or screenplay? When you had it ready how did you find an agent? How did you go about writing a screenplay in the proper format? How long should one be?

The sibling fields of winemaking and viticulture have been, until only recently, plagued by a similar lack of “virtual access.” While there have been a number of wine-tasting and cellar-building books out there for years, it is still a rare book that you’ll find telling you what it’s really like to grow organic grapevines on an acre and a half of land — let alone how to do it. This dearth of commonly available storytelling is of course one of the main reasons I decided to launch garagevino.com. At least I could present my account on the Internet bookshelf, so to speak, of my seemingly backwards adventure of winemaking first, then the grape-growing second…and while I don’t have the foot-traffic of a Borders at a shopping mall cruising past these shelves, nonetheless I’ve received a few comments that lead one to believe that at least some of the process of trial-and-error I’m recounting here can be helpful.

Garagevino.com aside, I’ve sought out every book I can find on the topics of viticulture and winemaking, particularly as it relates to the lifestyle of giving it a go. There are some interesting and even enlightening books out there and I thought I would mention those that I’ve run across. It only took me two books – Syd Field’s Screenplay and William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade – to get me rolling as a screenwriter, and perhaps two of the books I mention here will wind up being all it takes for you to jump into an acre of Merlot.

When my artisan winery is up and running and my tasting room is open to the public, I intend to have the full collection of books on these topics stocked on the tasting room shelf. Come to wine country enjoy the fabulous feel of a valley of Paradise. Take home a case of handcrafted wine, and throw in a book or two — you’ll be equipped with enough resources to keep wine country in your life for a while longer, no matter where you live or what you do.

In the meantime, I present below a list of books that, in most cases, offer a first-person account of what it’s actually like to shed the city life, roll up your sleeves, and get your hands dirty doing something you’ve always dreamed of doing – in this case, becoming a winemaker or farmer.

One thing about these books is that with the occasional exception I have found a common theme, which I’ll call “real life,” residing in their storylines. Farming ain’t easy, and grape-growing in particular ain’t easy at all. Years rather than months are required to yield your first crop, and, well — guess what? Real life happens along the way, and real life ain’t always Disneyland. So in most of these books, the beauty and joy of a life lived with the Earth, following the seasons, is often paired, as you might expect, with marital problems, challenges with kids, arguments with neighbors, even the tragedy of death. What I like about these sobering facets of the otherwise stunning portrait of a life lived in vines is that these authors/farmers are, in their lives and in their books and writings, being brutally honest. If you’ve ever tried to grow more than a flower in your backyard, or even just that one flower, you’ll know that nature, while magnificent in what she provides, can also be devastating and mean. Slugs, snails, aphids, rabbits, gophers, humidity and drought – any or all will inevitably wreak havoc on your dream of cultivating a glorious plot of flowers or crop of anything at all.

And life packs the same wallop with people as nature does for the garden.

I think I was most moved by the eerie, almost subconscious theme in Paula Moulton’s autobiography about winegrape growing in Glen Ellen, in Sonoma County, called Seasons Among the Vines. In her book, she constantly describes her husband’s “need for speed” and the frantic pace at which he lived, from driving to working nonstop as a doctor – as though he had barely any time left to live. Meanwhile she was pursuing her dream of fleeing to the country from San Francisco and growing grapes, walking among the vines, being in nature — experiencing the bliss of seasonality. Her kids changed their attitudes, she changed her attitude, and she found was a life she’d never known to exist with satisfactions she’d never anticipated. But as you read her book you just got the idea something sad was lurking over the horizon.

After reading it, I looked up her name online, anticipating that she might have a small winery or a bigger vineyard by now — and was touched and saddened, but in a not-unexpected sort of way, to find a tragic story in the Santa Rosa Democrat, explaining that Moulton’s husband had been killed in a head-on collision in the rain on a Santa Rosa highway.

In the article it was said that he was driving too fast in the rain.

Another book I found interesting, at least personally, was The Vineyard by Louisa Hargrave. I say it was interesting personally because it chronicles the Hargraves’ determination to start the first vineyard and winery on New York state’s North Fork of Long Island. As with Paula Moulton’s book, The Vineyard is also rife with reality, since despite the years of hard work by Louisa Hargrave and her husband from their post-graduate days on into their 40s, and their against-the-grain success of single-handedly launching a wine region, let alone establishing a vineyard and winery in a challenging climate…nonetheless the Hargraves got divorced some years after publishing the book.

Not nearly as charming or emotional as Moulton’s, Hargrave’s is certainly a good read, and if you’re interested in hearing how somebody started literally from scratch in the viticulture-winemaking realm, in a place previously considered inhospitable to such, this book is a can’t-miss.

My nomination for the Golden Globe in the category of Best Vineyard Books of All Time has to be A Vineyard Year by Joseph Novitski, with photographs by Nick Pavloff. It is the story of a newspaper reporter’s decision to leave his regular old life behind and quite literally become a farmer. The thing about Novitski’s book though he is that he really became a farmer — this was not a vanity project for him, and in addition to his laying down some of the most glorious and poetic prose ever to describe a lifestyle, living or setting, he writes what is probably the most authentic and accurately portrayed depiction of what it really means to be a winegrape grower. Here is a guy who hires almost none of it out (only the basic needs for extra hands in the pruning and harvesting of 20 acres of Zinfandel). Here is a guy who literally became one of the old-school set of winegrape farmers in Healdsburg’s Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma County. Here is a guy who was on the tractor more than he was in his own house, at the dinner table, or asleep in bed. In my opinion it is the ultimate wine book. Sure, the focus is on farming here, so if you’re looking for secrets on which yeast to use in making that barrel of fashionable Pinot in your garage, you won’t find that advice here. But if you’re looking for a true-to-life, beautiful, yet readable and absolutely real account of what the (supposedly glamorous) world of winegrape farming is all about, then look no further.

Also worth noting in addition to the mosaic-like prose in Novitski’s work are some of the more beautiful photographs ever taken of California wine country.

Here’s a short list of other notable books on the topics of viticulture and the winemaking…I’ve also included a couple other books which help paint a picture of what wine country is really like — not just a snapshot of the tasting rooms one visits on a weekend trip, but an overall flavor presentation of life as it is out there:

• From Vines to Wines by Jeff Cox (the ultimate guide to growing your own vines and making wine on the garage level)
• At Home in the Vineyard by Susan Sokol Blosser (the tale of the genesis of Willamette Valley Pinot Noir industry)
• A Tale of Two Valleys by Alan Deutschman (more of a historical perspective, but conveys the ambiance of Sonoma and Napa Valleys)
• A Good Year by Peter Mayle (forget the movie, which wasn’t bad either; the story has problems; but the flavor of wine country is captured here)

I’m sure there are more than a few other books out there I’ve neglected to mention simply because I haven’t encountered and read them, so please send me an e-mail or comment if you have any to recommend, and I’ll include them in a subsequent entry.

…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.

So if you’re following along you know I’ve decided to “go pro” for the 2008 harvest — one way or the other I’ve set out to make wine commercially by the end of this year.

The options as I see them for “going pro” include the following “training camps” on the way to my “rookie season”: 1) Custom Crush; 2) Alternating Proprietorship; 3) Lease/Purchase of a Winery without Vineyards; 4) Acquisition of an Existing Winery Estate and Brand. I spelled out the merits and drawbacks of each of these scenarios in my last post. Got some input from a wise winemaker friend on these points too (see the comments section at the end of the last post), including some sage advice on the topic of bringing partners to the table. This kind of echoes my own natural inclinations: I prefer not to answer to anybody but myself, being the bullheaded, stubborn, cynical writer type that I be. Which may speak to the merits of the update below, as I forge ahead as an aspiring professional wine dude.

THE DUAL CALL

My ideal choice in this set of options is my usual ambitious leap. Ideally, I assemble the bucks and acquire an existing winery I can immediately step in and run, top to bottom, bringing to bear my business experience and budding (though very young) winemaking and viticulture skills to the table as I turn a semisuccesful, 1,000-to-2,000-case operation into a full-fledged estate winery success story with a nice 5,000+ case clientele. This is where I want to be anyway, in that 2,000-5,000 case realm, and to be in the winery and out on the vineyard doing it all, with help from expert consultants and the appropriate staff, of course, as needed. I confessed from the outset that I’m not beginning with the industry-standard “large fortune,” but that I do in fact aspire to owning the whole package as my playground (and successful business enterprise) — winery, vineyard, tasting room, maybe a bed & breakfast on the property, a place people come to as a destination, where they pull in the flavors of the wine country life and remember their time there with the case of wine they bring home and keep in the cellar. Pulling a bottle out from time to time, of course.

I’ve even found the winery I’d like to acquire — in Paso Robles, a two-hour jaunt up U.S. 101 from my home, making for various possibilities on commuting, spending part of each week up at the winery, etc.

There are, however, a number of considerations involved with this ideal. Just to drag the analogy out, this concept doesn’t just involve “going pro” — it involves buying the franchise and installing myself in the starting lineup as point guard. (As a 5’-10” hoops junkie my fantasy was always to buy an NBA team and start myself for one game just to say I’d played pro ball…so I guess I’ve taken the fantasy and turned it into a business model for getting into the winery business right at the top.)

Anyway, the considerations are many: determining the value of the winery and a wise purchase price; determining the dedication of the wine club clientele and how loyal they’d remain under a change of ownership; how much more costly the winemaking effort would be for a rookie like me in that I’d need to bring in a winemaking consultant or advisor; what the real potential and strategy would be for growth; and of course the issue of investor partners. Unless I decide against buying a nice home in which to live, I’m not going to finance the whole purchase of an existing, profitable winery on my own. A vineyard maybe; a winery building and site; but when you start tacking on the winery business, an existing wine club or distribution channels, and so on, the pricetag becomes high enough to require some investors be brought to my winemaking table.

So here’s where I come out.

I would like to pursue the winery-acquisition option. I become a winery owner and vigneron immediately by going this route. And I am never one to shy away from coming in confident and up toward the top of the heap. The challenges and pressure are greater, but if you believe in your passion and skill and work ethic, you know you’ll make it work.

However, it is a long road to reach the point of closing the deal…particularly when fund-raising is required. Among the tasks at hand? Writing a business plan (I’ve got a draft but it could use some more glitz), sorting through acquisition terms, due diligence on the books, business, and property, approaching investors, nailing down their investment dollars, lawyers for the private-placement fund-raising technicalities, the recruiting of advisors, consultants, staff, and so on, and so on. At any stage in this process, I may decide I don’t like the deal, I don’t like an investor, not enough money might be raised, a competing buyer might step in — you name it.

So the last thing I want is to wind up investing nine months of my life in the potential deal, deciding against it, and looking at another harvest where I’m left with only the home/garage winemaking option since the permits and so on were not in place.

Therefore the first thing I’ve decided to do is to launch OPTION ONE:

THE CUSTOM CRUSH.

See, regardless of whatever else happens, if I get my federal, state, and county/local “wholesale wine/beer sales” permits in place, I will be street-legal when it comes to purchasing some grapes and entering into a custom-crush winemaking contract with a winery facility in the area. If I get the approvals nailed down, I will guarantee that I “go pro” this coming harvest season — I’ll have the chance to make wine professionally no matter what else comes to fruition, or falls through.

Not that the Custom Crush option isn’t a great one in its own right, but by deploying that option as my first and main step in “going pro,” I leave myself open to all the other possibilities as well. For instance, I may find an opportunity, at the right custom-crush facility, to accelerate the plan and advance to the Alternating Proprietorship business model even before buying my grapes and making my 2008 vintage. Or perhaps the acquisition deal moves along and goes through, and my wholesale permits become unnecessary.

By my understanding of things, four main tiers of permitting are required as part of any commercial custom-crush contract with a winery facility.

Tier One: First, there’s the federal license, called the “Basic Permit,” a permit granted by the TTB (the Alcohol and Tobbaco Tax and Trade Bureau) allowing you to purchase domestic or imported wine and/or beer at wholesale for reselling, also at wholesale. From a custom crush standpoint, the way this works, technically speaking, is that you are obtaining a wholesaler’s permit so that you can buy the finished wine from the custom crush winery, then resell it to retailers or wholesalers (under your label if you wish, and if you get your label approved) but not directly to the consumer.

Tier One Progress: This week, I filled my application out (you can find instructions, contact info, and forms at the TTB Website) and mailed it in. I had previously spoken with the very helpful folks at the TTB offices, in Cincinnati; they basically have a package of forms and instructions geared toward the custom-crush crowd. It’s all pretty self-explanatory. Things begin to get a little more complicated when you want to sell your wine at the retail level; not sure that you absolutely need to own a winery bond or the equivalent of a liquor or “package” store, but that’s pretty much the requirement. I figure I can cross the retail-sales bridge when I come to it — getting set up to make the wine commercially and be allowed to sell it wholesale is a great first step.

Tier Two: The second main tier of licensing is at the state level — in my case, it’s with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, also known as ABC. The paperwork is a bit more intense for this tier. But once again I’ve found the staff in the permitting offices to be highly helpful, and with a couple of calls I pretty much figured out where I need to be. In my case — lacking any retail/tasting room storefront and seeking only to get papered up at the wholesaler’s level to start with — I was told today by the Ventura office of ABC (handling Ventura and South Santa Barbara Counties) that what I need is a “17/20 Combination” permit. This refers to the sole-owner, non-warehousing, “off-sale” (e.g., non-retail) wine and/or beer sales permit boxes checked off during the overall ABC application process. There is also the “14,” or warehousing-location piece of the permit, dictating and licensing where the wine will be stored, which is generally a permit held by the custom crush facility you are contracting with (if that’s where you’re storing your wine, and possibly shipping it from, once it’s made). So I will need to submit a combination of forms relating to my office address (read: home) (read: garage), sources of funding, personal information, bank accounts, and so on.

While alcohol is, technically, a controlled substance, one begins to wonder how anyone with less than a PhD in form-filling-out has ever started a business around here. I think a great deal of the complicating factors are simply remnants of Prohibition policies — back then, at the point spirits, wine and beer became legal, the government wanted to keep any criminal element out of the industry…they probably still do, but I think the point back then was to keep anyone who’d been bootlegging out of the legitimate alcohol industry.

Tier Two Progress: I filled out the relevant forms in pencil and learned that the permit issued actually includes a license for the addresses of your office, bonded winery facility, and storage location — meaning I need to determine which custom crush facility I am using and place their address and related information on my permit application. Haven’t decided that yet — but this will prompt me to nail down that decision in the next month or so. Want to make sure I’m way out ahead with my permits and can focus instead on the important thing: the fruit I’m going to use for the wine. This brings me to…

Tier Three: Entering into a contract with a custom crush facility. This involves, technically speaking again, your entity entering into a wholesale wine-purchase contract involving “custom” crush/winemaking choices, with their grapes or yours. Once the crush takes place and the wine is made, you take possession of it and generally utilize the custom crush facility’s (or another facility’s) storage for your barrels/tanks/cases of wine (under their “14” wine-storage location permit, I assume).

Making the Custom-Crusher Call: Because of all the help he’s given me, I would like to use Nicholas Miller’s Central Coast Wine Services in Santa Maria, but they have a 2-ton or 3-ton minimum, depending, and it’s apparently their Paso Robles Wine Services facility that handles the smaller lots more effectively anyway. My intention is to start small and keep all costs to a total of $10k or so for at least 100 cases of wine, made in smaller lots than that. So tops on my list, if they are operational in time, is Terravant, where the orientation will be toward small-lot winemakers such as myself. Plus it is located in Buellton, a mere 40 minutes from here. Maybe Nick Miller will be able to be flexible for my small lots — and there is also the possibility of working with a Santa Barbara County winery where the owners do a bit of custom-crushing business on the side as well. I understand there are a few of these in Lompoc.

Tier Four: Ultimately you’ll need brand and label approval — another bridge I will cross when I get to it, unless ABC or TTB require submission of brand names and/or labels as part of the initial permit process, which I do not think they do. I intend to come up with some ideas, float them out to the readers of Garagevino.com, and solicit ideas as well, maybe hold a “win a case of my first professional wine” kind of contest to anyone who devises a name that I wind up going with. At this point my company name is The Staeger Wine Company and I’ve got a couple ideas for the wine-brand name and will hit that later.

THE WINE ITSELF (AKA THE GRAPES TO BE CRUSHED)

My notion, at this point, is to make two or three 50-case lots of wine. First would be Zinfandel. I am hoping, after our cool bit of correspondence, to shoot for some awesome fruit from Sonoma Valley via Morgan Twain-Peterson and his Bedrock Vineyard; depending on how the 2007 vintage continues to come along in my garage, I may also make some from Mike Prowse’s Creston Hills Vineyard, in Paso Robles, again.

Second, I would love to make what I love to drink, and two of the three wines I’ve enjoyed the most were the Matanzas Creek and Freemark Abbey Merlots. I’d like to make a supremely rich, complex, edgy, almost Santa Barbara County Syrah-ish Merlot, and possibly blend it with a bit of Cabernet…my own version of a Bordeaux, minus the Cab Franc. Perhaps, in the spirit of the havoc Sideways wreaked on the Merlot marketplace, I can unofficially call this lot of wine “Fuck Miles Merlot.” Be cool to call it that officially. Yeah right, says the TTB. I wonder though… could F#&! Miles Merlot work? We’ll see.

Third would be my other favorite wine — that being a 2000 Pia Cesaro Barolo (I think I have the name right). Anyway I enjoyed it in 2005 and it was something — complex and sharp and crisp and, by then, already quite drinkable. Nebbiolo is the fruit behind Barolo, and it hasn’t been done particularly well, and certainly not on a widescale basis here. I intend to try it and make it well.

The fourth possibility is a Sangiovese — I love a great Chianti; Chianti is actually a blend of Sangiovese and, depending on your moment in history, differing percentages of a couple different other grapes. I just read that some Chiantis are now made of a Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon blend, up to 10-15% Cab — something like that is the way I’d like to make my Sangiovese in the long run; first “pro” year out, maybe I’ll just stick to the 100% Sangiovese.

Thus ends my lengthy essay on the garagevino strategy focus in the quest to “go pro” this year. More ramblings soon, including the update on my idea for the winery acquisition — but, for now, I’ve got the permit-application process underway for the licenses I’ll need in order to custom-crush as much as a hundred and fifty cases of wine this fall…as a legitimate (or, more accurately put, illegitimate) wine pro!