You would think that bad weather would drive a blogging wine grower to blog even more, what with the dearth of things to do out in the vineyard besides walk and worry. And yet here we are, a month since my last post.
I’m happy to report that design is progressing (albeit slowly) on the winery and we’ve hired on a technical consultant to offer advice on process flow, winery layout, and to offer equipment recommendations. Tours of some local producers (Moshin and hopefully Dehlinger) should be just around the corner, and I’m excited to see what my neighbors are doing, and how they handle the challenges specific to pinot. I also look forward to posting the initial floor plans the minute I have them in my hands.
I’ve taken the past month to further educate myself on the business side of things. I took a few more wine business seminars at Sonoma State (one on budgeting given by the CFO of Trefethen Vineyards, and one on selling directly to retail stores with local treasure Bill Traverso) and met quite a few great folks who, like me, are trying to wrap their heads around the luxury wine market. Both were extremely valuable and I’m now looking forward to the three-week OIV wine marketing conference at Davis this July to learn some more valuable tools.
Last week I also had the opportunity to meet and listen to Walt Klenz open the new wine business lecture series at UCD named in his honor. Klenz is the former CEO of Beringer Blass (now Foster’s Wine Estates) and he gave a compelling talk regarding the future of the wine industry. One of the more interesting observations he made had to do with winery sizes. “Either be big or be very small” has long been the received wisdom in the wine business. If you were somewhere in the middle, the advice was to get big as fast as you could. What Klenz added to this was that the definition of “big” has changed drastically in the past 10 years. Now, he said, whereas 100K cases was once considered fairly large, 4 million cases is now considered “mid-sized” in terms of market share and the power to protect it.
Klenz also mentioned that there will always be room for small niche producers of 10,000 cases or less, saying that such producers are the soul of the industry. Perhaps he was just placating the crowd but I not only believe him, I wholeheartedly agree.
After a month hiatus I’ve got quite a bit to talk about so expect to see more frequent updates in the coming days. I have decided that this blog is most valuable as a chronicle of the winery startup process, and so I’ll be posting less on newsy items than I have in the past to keep the signal to noise ratio high. With the weather clearing and the design process picking up steam, I don’t think finding things to post about will be a problem at all. 
