Mentoring and Consulting: Pros and Cons

Cellar Rats (ITB)
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Winemaking is fun.

It can be hard work. It can also be highly stressful, what with the challenges of working with agriculture, sometimes dangerous and brutal working conditions, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of perishable product underfoot. But when you step back and look at it from an outsider’s point of view, lots of people want to be a winemaker.

Most winemakers generously give of their time and talent to mentor employees and interns, relishing their enthusiasm and appreciation for the balance of art and science. Many winemakers are also invited to act in a consulting-production capacity by startup wineries that will ultimately become a competitor for the consulting winemaker’s brand.

How do you decide when and if to become a mentor or consultant? When do you decide to cut the cord? How do you handle it when the client or apprentice jumps out of the nest?

Here are my notes from talking with others in the industry, absorbing their stories, and having a few experiences of our own. Please add tips and observations as you see fit. Retailer stories welcome too. Dreamers, be forewarned. Bullshit walks. But hard work, integrity, and the ability to jump start tractors will be rewarded.

  • Look past the initial enthusiasm. Work your interns hard before committing to help them make their own wine. Do not waste time and energy mentoring interns who don’t show up on time for punchdowns.
  • Beware of cellphone addicts. They’re more interested in telling their friends about the experience they’re having than they are in listening to instructions.
  • Do NOT offer to loan an intern a couple tons of grapes for their own brand. Internships are notoriously low pay, and by the time they’ve bottled their first vintage, they will have underestimated the costs involved in spite of dire warnings, moved on to another position, and they’ll be focusing their limited resources on keeping the brand alive. If a young/new intern wants to start their own brand with a ton or two of grapes, let them borrow the money from friends and family. If they can’t find support in that sector, there may be a reason.
  • Do not share your tasting room with an intern or client’s brand and do not let a crush intern who is making his own brand work in your tasting room. Their excitement and enthusiasm for their own project will dominate their presentations, even if they’re just two weeks into the first punchdown season of their lives.
    You will end up paying an intern to sell his own wine that he hasn’t paid you for yet.
  • With inexperienced startups … first, don’t take the job. But second, if you do, and the owner starts telling everyone he “made the wine” after just one crush, sever the connection completely. Clients who think they know what they’re doing will interfere with your process, disregard your advice and instructions, ruin the wine, and ultimately the smoke will drift back to you. If they want to fly solo, let them go.
  • Don’t stay long with “money is no object” clients. They will spend money like crazy for a short period of time on viewable, physical objects like gates, caves, barrels and whatever. But then they’ll run out of money and refuse to buy the crews necessary to operate the equipment or the supplies you need to realistically make wine. It’s exactly like the restaurant industry in that regard, except that it’s easier to sell a winery brand. I know of one young winemaker who quit a good job in Edna Valley to work for a rich startup that got tired of the expenses within a year and just closed up shop. Another winemaker working at a “money is no object” winery had to wait six weeks for every paycheck, while the owner’s family always got paid on time. Vet your clients–examine their long term sales, expense and capital projections. Particularly if they’ve already spent a lot of money on grounds, buildings, equipment and other capital expenses.
  • Don’t let any of these cautionary tales sour you on adopting a new batch of apprentices. Their enthusiasm and excitement is what keeps us all young and showing off.
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Wow, Mary! Tremendous post - thank you.

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Whoa. The timing of this post, in light of some information learned just today, is a little weird. The term “snake oil salesman” springs to mind. [whistle2.gif] The cell phone part especially.

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How do you mean?

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can’t you just leave J$#@$ alone!

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I know what you’re referring to, John. Although the part about cellphone conversations was taken strictly from crushpad experiences in Paso Robles. I’d like to point out that this conversation is designed to be among professionals, including yourself, who have advice to offer other winemakers and their interns. It will not be directed at one individual unless you choose to point it in that direction. And the door swings both ways. We all know there are winemakers who ridicule employees in public, who embody the Zero Effect, and who make consulting promises to clients that they have no intention or ability of fulfilling. The wine industry is no more perfect than any other. In fact, the bucolic backdrop of vines waving in the breeze would make an alluring opening for Indiana Jones. This thread is about sharing those stepping stones and cautionary tales for the edification of all dreamers and weavers.

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Very well said Mary. [notworthy.gif] In partial response to your original post, you may want to add “Beware of false prophets with a penchant for name dropping.”

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I know Jeff Leve

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(Overhead Holdredge talking with a female intern,) “no-one tells you what the secret ingredient is without some kind of extracurricular activities as a quid pro quo.”

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I’m not sure what you mean by this, I guess I’m not staying up with the gossip. Darn. [cray.gif]
But the same guidelines apply in this industry as in any other … the more high profile names on a resume, the less time a person has spent at each spot. It can be a positive–breadth of experience, exposure to different winemaking regimens and philosophies, flexibility. But you can gain these characteristics while working for fewer mentors, simply by keeping an open mind and discussing technique and philosophy with associates. So a long, overly impressive resume is generally a negative. Winemaking requires patience, dedication, attention to detail. Someone who blows into a winery to take notes for a year and then habitually moves on generally applies that blitzkrieg approach to every aspect of winemaking. And they generally rely on their extensive notes and “experience” instead of looking within for creative problem solving. Such employees can also be highly intolerant of others, as they have never had to accept long term relationships. I’m generalizing of course, but I have sat on a wine industry board, and I’ve worked for larger wineries. Seen plenty of resumes in my day, and I’ve fed 10 years’ of worth of crush interns. (Most of whom, I am proud to say, have gone on to establish their own brands.) Perhaps other members here with human resources or psychology experience can chime in on this.

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Wow, you Cal winemakers down there are sure friendly! I didn’t know you could take advantage of…er, I mean ‘intern’ like that. I’ve just launched my small winery up here in Washington the hard way. I took 2 years of winemaking classes to learn how to make wine before I ever tried it with real grapes. Then I joined a home winemaker club that purchases grapes as a group. We share a crusher/destemmer, so we truck the grapes back to our club location from Eastern WA, crush into our fermentors and then take it home to ferment and finish. I bought a 35 ratchet basket press and have made wine at home in my garage for 3 years. I’ve also volunteered at many wineries for several years now, doing everything I possibly could, crush, punch downs, cleaning, bottling, etc. I had a only a vague pipedream of doing wine as a pro some day, but never really seriously considered it until a friend who owns a winery in Woodinville encouraged me and offered me some space in his place to get licensed and bonded.

I am starting out my first commercial vintage making a whopping 2 barrels of wine! Why so small? Because this all I can afford. I’m not making wine to make money, I’m doing it because I love it. But more importantly, I don’t want to borrow any money, so my business plan is to only grow as I can make profit and fund it by myself. I will double in size this harvest in 2009 to 4 barrels. Woo-hoo! I’ve made great friends and contacts along the way and my focus is on quality and because I am so small I can do that.

Just thought I’d post this to show there are newcomers out here like me who want to get into the biz not just for the glitz but for the love of the process and work of making wine. I know that if I can make quality juice, and I am confident I can, I will be able to sell it and grow.

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[cheers.gif] Dave - Good luck to you on your efforts. What is the name of your business and what are you making?

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That is exactly the kind of dedication and sensibility that many winery employers value. I am sure your friend in Woodinville feels very comfortable extending this opportunity, and welcomes your company and enthusiasm.

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Actually, it went as follows: Sometime shortly after I had carefully explained to her (the intern) how to partially wrap the destemmer with saran wrap (which we call “putting on a condom”), we were trying to improve the accuracy of a digital tank thermometer by filling the thermwell with vaseline (long story- poor ending). The intern said “wow, I had no idea how much vaseline and condoms were part of winemaking”. She asked me how I knew all this stuff, to which I replied…

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Did you get a [smack.gif] ???