It’s long been said that to make a small fortune in the wine business, you start with a large fortune and buy a winery. Alas, no more. You want to be a winemaker? Well, come on down, because the price is right! The ability to craft your own wine, in a style you prefer, using grapes from outstanding vineyards, used to be an indulgence solely for the better-heeled. Most self-declared oenophiles don’t have the luxury of space—much less extra cash to invest in relatively expensive winemaking supplies. As for access to better vineyards, well, it’s been a pipe dream.
But as America’s love affair with wine flourishes, a new world is opening up to consumers. For a relatively small cash outlay, you can make your own wine from outstanding vineyard sources, using state-of-the art winemaking equipment, with assistance from a professional winemaker. And here’s the best part: You can do it for about half the price of what you’d pay for a comparable wine under a commercial label.
Welcome to the world of “custom crush.” It’s growing as rapidly as you can read.
For decades, wineries with excess production capacity (tanks, barrels and equipment) have been doing custom crushes for commercial winemakers who don’t own winemaking facilities. However, most of the wineries have set guidelines as to minimum tonnage, shutting little guys who only want to make a barrel or two out of the picture.
Such was the case when Michael Brill, a longtime wine collector and connoisseur, decided he wanted to make wine from the grapes he’d planted in the backyard of his San Francisco home. Lack of access to winemaking facilities led him to bite the bullet, invest in some equipment and set up shop in his garage during the 2003 harvest.
Brill soon found his garage winemaking created quite a stir among neighbors and friends. “People would wander down the street to see what we were doing and they’d end up helping us make the wine. It was free labor. Word spread, and they’d bring friends. By the end of the project, 140 people had volunteered,” Brill says.
Brill took note of a couple of things. First of all, his volunteer army of amateur winemakers always wore big smiles, obviously enjoyed what they were doing and wanted to know when they could do it again. Second, it was a real challenge to hold down a day job and make wine at the same time.
“I was working full time [at BlackPearl Software] in Mountain View. Making wine is very hands-on, and if you miss something, you lose,” he says. “I was getting up at 5:30 a.m. to do punch downs and adjust temperatures. Then I’d drive to work, come home again at lunch to tend the wine, then go back to work with stuff all over my shirt and fingers. It was challenging, but fun. But I had this idea to find a place where people like me could go to make wine, using great fruit with the help of winemakers and with the right equipment.”
That was the genesis of Crushpad, one of the first custom crush facilities to offer a wide range of winemaking options to private individuals as well as those with commercial labels. And it turns out, the response is overwhelming.
With funding from investors, Brill opened a 5,000-square-foot space in San Francisco in March 2004. This past summer, Crushpad moved to a 49,000-square-foot facility at Third and 23rd streets—and has plans to expand worldwide. The resounding success of Crushpad has reverberated throughout the wine industry, spawning similar (but smaller) operations, such as Sonoma Grapemasters, Kings Hill Cellars and The Blending Cellar, among others.
For wine consumers interested in making their own wine, there are plenty of options. The Blending Cellar in Glen Ellen will custom blend as few as six bottles per customer, while the larger operations, like Crushpad and Sonoma Grapemasters, have a one-barrel minimum. Under federal law (BATF 1541), home winemakers are only allowed to make up to 200 gallons of wine for personal consumption. However, because Crushpad and Sonoma Grapemasters are bonded wineries, essentially selling wine to the novice winemaker, there’s no legal cap on how much wine a person can make.
Individual involvement in the winemaking process is at the discretion of the consumer. Some prefer a more hands-on experience while others limit their personal involvement, tracking the process via Internet instead of in person.
The Blending Cellar
For wine connoisseurs just wanting to get their feet wet, The Blending Cellar at the Mayo Family Winery in Glen Ellen offers the perfect entry-level program.
Partners Jeff McEachern and Jeff Mayo have crafted a winemaking program that’s a much smaller operation, focused on personalized red blends using five classic Bordeaux grapes traditionally found in Meritage wines.
“Most of the winemaking programs out there require you to buy a barrel, which means the consumer is making a commitment for 24 cases of wine totaling $5,000 to $7,000. That’s a lot of wine,” comments McEachern. “It takes money and patience, because sometimes you don’t get your final product until a few years later. What we offer is very different. You can order your custom blend while only commiting to six bottles at $40 each and have your wine within two weeks with a customized, winery-quality label.”
Mayo Family winemaker Mike Berthoud selects premium grapes—Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot—from vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties, including Red Dog Vineyard on Prichard Hill in Napa and Delaney Family Vineyard in Sonoma’s Russian River Valley. The Blending Cellar provides its custom blends using these wines.
The program offers individuals two options. Novice winemakers can come on-site to the Blending Cellar and make wine there, or they can order a blending kit and literally make wine from the comfort of their own home. For only $100, The Blending Cellar will ship the kit, which includes six 375mL bottles—one each of Merlot, Malbec, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Franc, plus two Cabernet Sauvignons—plus measuring beakers, instructions on how to create your own blend and label templates that can be customized. Once the consumer settles on a blend and a quantity, they fax their “recipe” back to The Blending Cellar, and the wine is crafted to the individual’s specifications using the Mayo Family Winery’s facility. “We usually promise delivery within two to three weeks,” McEachern says.
The Blending Cellar (www.blendingcellar.com) celebrates its one-year anniversary in October. McEachern estimates they’ve served thousands of individuals, near and far. In addition to the home kits and walk-ins at The Blending Cellar, Mayo and McEachern have started an outreach program, traveling to hotels and resorts where they’ve worked with corporate groups of up to 250 people.
Kings Hill Cellars
Over at Kings Hill Cellars (www.kingshillcellars.com), wine afficionado Lindsay Austin is sharing his “overgrown hobby” with other wine enthusiasts, focusing solely on making wine in very limited quantities by selling winemaking memberships to consumers who want to create personal, noncommercial brands.
“This is a private winery,” explains Austin, who is chairman and co-founder of San Jose-based Pavilion Integration Corporation. “We have a limited production of 20 barrels a year, maximum, for the entire winery. People can buy one-year memberships and make a barrel or a half-barrel of wine.”
Costs vary, depending on the selected varietal. The average cost to make a barrel (24 cases) of Sauvignon Blanc is $4,500, while a barrel of Cabernet Sauvignon commands $5,450. A few of his clients even provide their own grapes.
The majority of Austin’s clients are people who have decent sized wine cellars and are eager to learn all aspects of winemaking. His members keep their wine or give it away—under federal law, they can’t sell it.
“We’re focused on serving fewer people, and we cater to their fun side,” Austin explains. “Our members aren’t afraid of getting their hands on the grapes. It’s a great group of people who make great wine together. We have a crush event, a labeling event, a bottling event and we have a graphic artist who designs the personalized labels. You could say we’re providing quasi-entertainment, but a lot of our clients are very serious about wine and are really into wine education.
“In the end, they’ve truly made their own wine—and we go to great pains to make sure it’s outstanding, too.”
Since its founding, Austin has donated several wine memberships to his favorite charities as fund-raisers. Last year, Exchange Bank Chairman Bill Reinking and his wife, Mary-Louise, purchased a half-barrel membership at an auction benefiting the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa.
“It’s been a fantastic experience,” Reinking says. “We’re not wine connoisseurs by any stretch of the imagination. We find what we like and drink it. But this has been really neat.”
Reinking and his barrel partner, grocery executive Ken Silveira, who owns Fiesta and Pacific Markets, worked with winemaker Richard Mansfield to make a Cabernet Sauvignon with a smidgeon (6 percent) of Merlot blended in. The 12 cases that will go into the Reinking home wine cellar will be labeled “Woof Woof Cellars, Bobby’s Best Bred Red.” It’s a salute to the Reinkings’ black Labrador retriever, Bobby, who’s sired more than 650 puppies that have been trained as service dogs by Santa Rosa’s Canine Companions for Independence.
Bobby has sired the highest percentage of dogs that have actually gone into service—no small feat, considering the rigorous training programs employed by the organization.
“He’s a cult hero,” Reinking says, “with his own cult wine.”
Sonoma Grapemasters
With a keen eye on the Crushpad model, John Tracy and Stephen Yafa have created Sonoma Grapemasters (www.sonomagrapemasters.com), now in its pilot year. It operates out of one of Sonoma County’s largest custom crush facilities, Owl Ridge Wine Services, which has 37,000 square feet at the old Vacu-Dry facility on the southwest corner of Gravenstein Highway and Occidental Road in Sebastopol.
Owl Ridge Wine Services has 34 clients and a 3,000-barrel cellar. In 2006, it made about 60,000 cases of wine for some of Sonoma County’s most celebrated “cult” producers, including Tandem, Trione, MacPhail, Sonoma Coast Vineyards and Halleck. It’s owned by Tracy and his wife, Deborah. The couple moved to Bodega Bay shortly after John retired from Arizona’s Opto Power Corporation in 1999.
“Over the past couple of decades, the custom crush business has evolved to accommodate smaller and smaller clients. Crushpad is the ultimate evolution of this trend, and we’d be foolish to ignore the model,” Tracy says. “While many of our clients now represent very substantial tonnages, most of our individual lots are small. But it’s still true that to be a successful custom crush client requires substantial expertise, time and cash resources. Many people who would love to make a small amount of wine for personal use don’t have those things.”
Tracy himself was once in their shoes. He made his first wine in his garage in 2001 after crushing grapes in the driveway. He later purchased vineyard property in Forestville and then partnered with Joe Otos, described by Tracy as “a young winemaker who worked at Wellington Winery in Sonoma Valley.”
While doing custom crush at Wellington, Tracy and Otos, along with another partner, Ed Sillari, started the Willowbrook label, which specializes in Pinot Noir. In 2002, Tracy wanted to expand into Cabernet Sauvignon, so he started a new label called Owl Ridge. In 2004, he purchased the Greg and Greg custom crush facility and renamed it Owl Ridge Wine Services.
“People want to make wine. But the economics are that most can’t plunk down a couple hundred thousand dollars to start even a small commercial wine label,” says Tracy, who saw it as a business opportunity, “but because of the rapid growth of our main business, no one on the staff had the bandwidth to do it.”
Enter writer, book author and home winemaker Stephen Yafa. Yafa was working at Owl Ridge Wine Services with winemaker Greg LaFollette of Tandem Winery, who was serving as Stephen’s consulting winemaker for his new commercial Pinot Noir brand, Segue. A casual conversation with Tracy about the needs of home winemakers evolved into Sonoma Grapemasters, a program that offers consumers a chance to make “your own wine, your own way” in a high-end facility and with one-on-one assistance from a respected commercial winemaker. Yafa is now the program director.
Through connections with top growers in Napa and Sonoma, Sonoma Grapemasters sources and purchases fruit. Then it’s up to the consumer as to just how involved he or she wants to be. The professional staff at Owl Ridge guides consumers through the process, just as it’s done at Crushpad. Clients must make a minimum of one barrel of wine. Sonoma Grapemasters accepts single barrel partnerships of up to three people. Average cost is $5,000 to $9,000 per barrel, depending on the varietal. That translates to $21 to $33 per bottle.
Yafa explains that Sonoma Grapemasters isn’t in direct competition with Crushpad: “We offer an experience in a working winery in the Russian River Valley that’s quite different from making wine in a warehouse in San Francisco. While we’re concentrating on Russian River wines such as Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, we also source premium Cabernet, Merlot and other grapes from Stag’s Leap, Mt. Veeder and other top Napa appellations.”
“This is about rubbing elbows with professional winemakers while you’re doing your work,” he continues. “We want you to learn as much as you choose to about the process, and we’re set up to provide education as well as recreation. In our view, that’s part of the fun: The more you learn, the easier it will be to make crucial decisions about style with your winemaker.”
Crushpad
Undeniably, Michael Brill of Crushpad (www.crushpadwine.com) is the king of “customer crush,” the man who wants to bring winemaking to the masses. Crushpad’s website says it wants to “liberate winemaking from the stereotype of the fifth-generation family living on the chateau with the golden retriever.” And by all accounts, it’s doing just that.
Now into its fourth harvest, Crushpad has 3,000 clients—and an unabashed “take over the world” strategy. “We want to be everywhere,” says Brill, who’s announced plans for a Crushpad marketing arm in Japan. “There are about two million wine enthusiasts in the United States, and we only have about 3,000 of them. That gives us a lot to shoot for.”
Crushpad requires a minimum investment of one barrel, but allows partnerships. Price depends not only on the varietal, but also on the vineyard from which the wine is sourced. Crushpad has grape contracts from as far away as eastern Washington state to California’s Santa Rita Hills. It sources most of its Pinot Noir from two of the best growing regions in California, the Russian River Valley and Anderson Valley, and most of its Cabernet Sauvignon hails from Napa Valley. Crushpad focuses on vineyards with a track record of high-scoring wines from well-known producers.
“Cabernet Sauvignon is usually between $7,500 and $12,000 a barrel. Pinot Noir is about $6,900, or $23 a bottle. These wines are comparable to commercial wines at about twice that price. It’s really a great deal,” Brill says.
Initially, Brill expected half of his business to come from restaurants and resellers interested in making proprietary wines.
“I was wrong,” he admits. “Restaurants and resellers really haven’t been too much a part of the business, and I think that’s because our customers pay us up front. They assume the cash flow and the product risk; no matter what they make, it’s theirs. I think sommeliers have a hard sell trying to convince a restaurant owner to spend $8,000 on a wine they won’t see for three years, especially with no guarantee of quality.”
Another miscalculation Brill made was the number of people who would want to use Crushpad to make commercial wine.
“It never occurred to me that people would want to make wine and sell it. But my second customer was David ‘Dain’ Smith, who now has his own wine business. [Note: Dain lives in Springfield, Mo., and makes wine commercially available under the Dain Wines label. The wines are made at Crushpad and use California fruit.] We have about 100 commercial wines that have been developed here since we opened,” he says. “We had to hire three different compliance and law firms to get us to the point where Dain could create and sell wine without being drowned by paperwork. We want our commercial winemakers to worry only about making and marketing the wine. We want to do everything else for them, from compliance to direct shipping—and we do.”
Satisfied customers
Crushpad works with each client during the planning process, either in person or via phone and Internet. They keep in touch on a regular basis, delivering information on what’s happening in the vineyard. When it’s time to crush, they encourage clients to come to the Crushpad facility and sort the fruit.
Clients can be as hands-on as they want, but for those who can’t make it in on a regular basis, Crushpad provides streaming cameras that let them watch winery activities. They send barrel samples for review and, when it comes time to create the blends (for Cabernet Sauvignons and Meritage wines), clients receive a “fuse box” (blending kit), which lets them assemble their blends at home, then go online and communicate their final formula back to Crushpad.
Under the supervision of Crushpad, Larry and Jean Rowe of Orinda are making a Meritage in honor of their 25th wedding anniversary. Inspired by a trip to Bordeaux, where they visited several of the top chateaus, they’re currently working on a label design. When it’s finished, the wine will be called Vingt Cinq (French for “twenty-five”).
The couple became interested in making their own wine after reading about Crushpad in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s been an excellent experience,” says Larry. “Crushpad works hard to make sure the customer experience is good, and it’s just spectacular. When I wasn’t working full time, I had a chance to check the wine every three or four weeks. Now that I’m working [he’s an executive at FX Palo Alto Research Laboratory], I don’t have that kind of time. But I don’t really worry, because I’m with professionals.”
Rowe also thinks his project is “a huge bargain.” His particular Meritage includes Cabernet Sauvignon from Stagecoach, one of Napa’s premier Cabernet vineyards. Rowe will pay about 50 percent less for his wine than if he purchased a comparable commercial label from the same source. He thinks if the consumer winemaking trend really catches on, “We might see downward pressure on the prices of top quality wines [commercially].”
Hemant Shah is another Crushpad customer. By day, he’s a catastrophe modeler for Risk Management Solutions in Newark, mapping out the risk implications of terrorist attacks, infectious diseases, weather disasters and other such cheerful subject matter for insurance companies. For Shah, winemaking is a release.
“There’s no comparison to my day job. It’s satisfying that [working with Crushpad] is so different—and it’s very therapeutic,” he says. “It’s a way of engaging my energy in a very different outlet.”
Shah is making his wine, a Syrah from White Hawk Vineyard in Santa Barbara, with a friend, Sam Hunt. “It’s more fun to do it together, and my experience has been pretty good. It’s an excellent way to learn how to make wine. I’d like to be able to make it myself in the future, but I appreciate having someone hold my hand,” Shah says.
Once the Syrah is done, Shah plans to make a Dry Creek Zinfandel at Crushpad. He and his wife, Danielle, own 10 acres in Dry Creek Valley. He’s currently taking soil samples and scouting locations on his property where grapevines might thrive. “I just want to grow enough grapes to make wine for home use,” Shah says. “Believe me, I have no aspirations to do a commercial brand.”
Hmm…anyone willing to model that particular risk?
