Before you read this keep in mind this only pertains to a winery opening a tasting room and not a wine bar (the two are comnpletely different from eachother).
We want to open a very small tasting room for our winery. We are in the city limits, we will have to file for a dupe 02 to get the abc to give us the right to move forward. The builing we want to use does not have a ADA approved bathroom. Soooo we know we will have to put one in but our city only requires one unisex bathroom given our sq footage. The county requires a seperate ADA approved bathroom for each gender regardless of the sq footage (this would put us seriously over budget). The million dollar question is do we have to get the county health sign off to get our ABC dupe 02 approved if we are in city limits or is the city sign off enough. We have to know the answer to this question before we move forward given the dollar amount it will affect us with. Has anyone gone through this exact situation in California? Can you help answer this question given your experience? Thanks again guys!!!
Our type 2 is in Woodside and we do not have a tasting room, the permit is old (1990) and we only had to have city sign off.
More to your local situation, our type 17 and 20 permits are in San Jose, we didn’t have to get any sign off from the county on anything. The city inspector and then the state ABC inspector were all we ever saw. the 17 & 20’s are not permits to pour, so it could be totally different, but in general if you are in the city limits, the city of Santa Clara is the only entity that will need to sign off.
Sooo. Here’s the skinny. County health requires a food permit because serving wine is considered food. So we have to have two gender specific ADA approved bathrooms with special requirements, a special lowered portion of the bar at least 6 feet long, 3 sinks for washing glasses, one seperate sink for employee handwashing and one mop sink. A special hot water heater with two elements and a million small details like proper signage. plumbing permits for it all to be installed then we can start the permit process with them which starts at $1000 for plan review. so in our 500 sq ft building there will be 400 ft of requirements and 100 sg ft for us to put a bar in and add retail… Got to love California.
I forgot the part about bar/counter height. Our Checkout counter is 34 inches on one side and 36 on the other. To put in our floor sink, I had to jack hammer up nine feet of concrete and put in new sewer connections. I hate to say it, but you might be better off starting with a new building or in the case or our county, take out one wall and extend the room whatever direction you can. (It’s easier to add to an existing building than to get a permit for a new building) The alternative is to use the building for office or retail space and find a location that pours wines for multiple wineries and pay your fair share of the rent until you can build an appropriate tasting room.
When it comes to adding on to an existing structure, I’ve seen entire wineries added to the back wall of a barn that gets turned into the retail/tasting room.
Yeah I hear ya. Either way, it’s not going to be easy. So you had to run the mop sink straight to sewer and not just to any drain like the other sinks? Wow… Wine drinkers, welcome to the not so romantic part of winemaking!!! [suicide.gif]
Oh Yeah, I forgot. Your mop and mop bucket may not be stored in the same room as your three compartment sink, so plan storage for that too. I actually have the mop sink, floor drain, hand sink and dish washer all in a room that is about 6’ X 15’, along with two storage cabinets for glassware, towels, TP, etc. The room is at the back of our building, 30+ feet from our bar. I did the plans for the build out, which were reviewed and signed by the “required architect.” Depending on where your sewer and water lines are it may not be real tough to come up with plans for “improvement.” Some of the costs are just unavoidable. If you are going to “expand,” I would expand as much as you can.