Hi!
Question for the community:
A winemaking service offers you the chance to connect with and control the end-to-end winemaking process, including grape selection, the crush, fermenting, and the blend. At the end of the experience, as a customer, you will have created your own private barrel and bottled cases of your wine with a custom designed label.
If money were not an issue, would you take advantage of this service? Why or why not?
Appreciate any and all perspectives - thank you!
Yes . Why the heck not.
I’d be in too.
This is one of the offers of a custom crush facility. I custom crush - my wine venture is way too small for a brick-and-mortar operation. So are many of the sought after wines enjoyed by participants here.
But what is missing in this equation is the farming. You only get the fruit that is harvested. Farming is a HUGE part of the winemaking/enjoying experience. Do you have the experience to taste the fruit that someone has harvested and know that it will make great wine? Or the wine you want?
Matty, Bruce - do you understand the costs involved in this? “Why the heck not” is not an informed response.
Love both you guys, but you need to know what is involved from a cost/expense point of view.
I missed that, my apologies. It was the guy’s first post, I think. Happy to talk offline with anyone who is interested in this kind of venture. My direct email is in my signature.
No.
Apple hardware/software allows me to make my own movies.
But I know that Paul Thomas Anderson, for example, makes better movies than I ever could.
Been there, done that.
You ever hear of crush Pad?
No way. I know folks who have gone down this road and ended up with a lot of crappy wine at the end.
This is already a thing.
If money is no object you could buy an island or fly to the moon or buy the greatest wines in the category of wine you like the most. Not sure I have ever understood the desire to do something that would cost not an insignificant amount and likely be terrible in the end. I guess you could say that taking piano lessons could be expensive and you might always be a terrible piano player so you wasted your money. However at the end you don’t have 290 pianos lying around so that would be different. It would be better to intern at a winery facility like that and gain some modicum of experience and see how it’s done and whether that is something you can retain, learn, mimic and do on your own. Also, making a very small amount of wine is actually harder than making a lot of wine. We would never (or extremely rarely) ferment grapes in a quantity that would yield 1 barrel. It’s hard to do well. We’ve done and made great wine and we’ve done and made okay wine. I’ve seen people with not much experience make some really nasty stuff in 60 gallon lots. Not trying to be all “I am a professional and only pros can do it” but honestly it’s not easy (especially if you really are just doing it for the first time on a lark) and the results are not likely to be so satisfying that you will enjoy it 290 times later.
We did this for the 05 and 06 vintage with Syrah grapes from Thompson Vineyard and Cab from a vineyard we were sworn to secrecy to protect the source. We had a consulting winemaker from Crushpad to help with the process.The wines turned out fabulous.All in the Syrah was about $30 a bottle and the Cab around $40.It was fun but I would never do it for a living, my appreciation and respect for winemaking made a quantum leap. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
If money were not an issue I’d buy a machine that made me forty years younger. In the meantime let me say a few words about Crushpad. Friends of mine invested and this did not turn out well.
1/People discover how hard it is to drink 10 cases of wine. The people who made wine with the idea of going big time?? I don t know what happened to them.
2/The internet made it easy for people to participate and easy for them to stop doing it. If there had been a dedicated sales force maybe it would have survived the 2008 /2009 recession.
3/Maybe they bit off more than they could do. You could make pinot noir from Oregon, and about five regions in California and use one third, one half and 100% new oak barrels. They had new barrels re configured with used staves ! Then there was cabernet and merlot from Washington state and three or four regions in California.
Of course, they made white wines too. The only choice not available to the customer was when to pick. Minor detail!
4/I have no idea how the wines, fermented in little bins, turned out.
I am not sure exactly what JP is considering. It does remind me of a wine and cheese store owner who had the idea that people would pay him to work in his tasting room and stock his shelves so they could learn about wine and experience the great wines of the world. Of course, Jim is right that apprenticing to somebody who actually knows what to do is a good start. A friend of mine became an expert at installing wallpaper all on his own. The first five attempts were disasters, then he got better and better …I asked him why he didn’t take lessons or something like that and he kinda looked at me as if to say, I never thought of that.
Funny. Both wineries I’ve seen offering a pink Chardonnay also advertised custom crush services. One of them had advertised custom crush to do along with their very own first vintage! (*That’s pink from leeching out color from a barrel previously used for red wine.)
Anyway, there’s no shortage of mediocre options out there. Issues raised above. But, there are some excellent options, too. As Merrill noted, some of the board favorites are custom crush.
The scale of Crush Pad was insane! That alone made it unsustainable. It was a fad to do, creating a boom, but people burnt out after a few vintages. These can certainly be commercial wines, which you can sell. But, selling wine is a pain in the ass. More so when all the wine buyers could smell a Crush Pad wine a mile away, knowing there were a hundred Pinots from there that were essentially the same wine, that would sit on a shelf and not sell. If I heard it right, they peaked at 125-130 employees and made over 1000 wines.
LOL this was exactly my response. I already suck at so many things, I am not in search of new things to suck at. Especially ones that cost a lot of money. This is why I can’t even imagine playing golf.
The question being asked is about paying someone else to do that job, with a few token choices for you to make, so you can delude yourself that you’re controlling the process, when you’re really just ordering from a menu. The OP looks like it was lifted from a sales spiel to that effect. But, at best, the equivalent is to being a movie producer, not a director.
Not how I read it. “A winemaking service offers you the chance to connect with and control the end-to-end winemaking process, including grape selection, the crush, fermenting, and the blend.” Control end-to-end.
But it doesn’t matter. No interest. Not even a little.
If I could afford to do something like that, I would buy better wine than I do and more of it. I would definitely not do the custom crush thing. The reasons have all been mentioned in other posts. And yes, this has been an existing and fairly widespread business model for quite some time. I think there are reasons no one has had huge success with it.
Not how I read it. “A winemaking service offers you the chance to connect with and control the end-to-end winemaking process, including grape selection, the crush, fermenting, and the blend.” Control end-to-end.
But it doesn’t matter. No interest. Not even a little.
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That is how it worked for our group at crushpad.Grapes were priced per ton depending on the source and availability.We had 10 people involved with 2 living in close proximity to Napa, and one with previous winemaking experience so we were very involved as a group.As with most groups the thrill was gone after a couple years.The wines we made are still drinking great to this day.