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When I returned from a tour
of duty in Germany
in 1972, I was introduced to the world of winemaking (I was already
quite
familiar with the world of wine drinking) by someone who
eventually
became my sister's father-in-law, the late Bill Koch. His mastery
of
chemistry
and my strong back complemented each other and we made a fine wine,
a Napa
Cabernet Sauvignon. I was hooked, and I have made wine every year
since, except
one when I lived in a studio apartment- it is difficult to do crush in
an
apartment.
There has been a lot of wine under the bridge and over the palate since
then
and more than a couple of gallons found its way to the sewer as I
learned from
my amateur mistakes. Making wine is part art and part science. You can
follow a
protocol on a piece of paper, but then you will be helpless if
something
goes wrong.
You cannot learn to make artful wine from a book any more than you
could learn
to fly an airplane from reading a text. You gotta do it up-close and
personal,
make mistakes and understand why they happened. Mistakes, oh yeah, I've
had
some doozies, even after I went commercial in 1987.
I may be a kick-ass winemaker at this point, but the success
or failure of a
winery lies in its sales. It's easy for me to make great wine; it's
much harder to sell it. If you have dreams of starting your own winery,
here is your
first piece of consulting advice: make sure you have someone, someone
who is
not associated with the fundamental production of the wine, to travel
the
merchant road to sell it to retailers, bars, restaurants and
supermarkets. I
believe that those who create the wine are too busy focusing on the
wine's
creation, and are too close to it emotionally, to be much
help in
selling the wine. And it is a very tough market out there as mega
wineries drop
their prices in response to the economic temperature and in response to
the
fact they have full tanks and a new crop of grapes coming in to make
into more wine
in a few months. I know, I know, you are saying "Well most of that is
innocuous everyday wine, MY wine is great!" Unfortunately, the truer
that
is, the more unhappy the situation. There are only
a small
number of people who will purchase an unknown winery's excellent wine.
Fewer will buy it
if they
can buy a known McDonald's standardized wine whose taste they can be
assured of
for half the price or (usually much) less. The second piece of
consulting advice I have about
that is.....nah, you gotta pay for some of these thoughts.
Maybe you don’t
want to run a
commercial operation. It’s a lot of work to set up and the
required monthly paper
work alone would cause most people to pause. So maybe you don’t
want to open a
bonded winery, maybe you only want to make some
good wine for friends and
family. Cool. That’s how it started for me. Do you need a
dedicated consultant?
Here are some questions:
Did you start making your own
wine to “save money”?
How much money are you
investing in grapes and equipment/rentals to get this airplane off the
runway?
Add it up.
Are you extremely happy with
your last effort? (I am assuming you have started. If not, the question
is
still relevant. Do you want to be extremely happy with your wine?)
Do people back away when you
offer them your homemade product?
As the
winemaker/owner of a
small top-quality winery, people often brought home-made samples for me
to
taste. I
always asked them, “Do you want me to be nice or do you want me
to be honest?”
After reducing several grown men to near tears with my honest
evaluation (no
one
ever said they’d rather that I was nice),
I started asking five
important questions about the wine before starting my taste evaluation:
1) What is the pH of the wine?
2) what is the free SO2 of
the wine?
3)what is the molecular SO2
of the wine? This is sort of a trick
question because the molecular SO2 is calculated by using the answers
to 1 and
2.
4) Has the wine completed
Malo-Lactic fermentation?
5) Is there any residual
sugar in the wine?
If the home winemaker, some
of whom had spent thousands of dollars on grapes and barrels, did not
have a
clue to any of these answers, the odds were 3-1 that the wine was not
something
with which an objective party would want to even wash his car, but
there was a
small chance that someone got lucky and produced a drinkable wine. You
cannot
overlook the science part and just hope you get lucky. Oh, you can get
lucky for
one year, maybe even two, but by the third year when you have increased
the
stakes in your hobby from minor to major dollar and time investment,
the
science will catch up with you. You might be at this point now if you
are
the only
one who will drink your wine, and even your spouse has stopped
pretending to
like it.
You may want to contact me.
My rates are reasonable ($75 per hour) but not negotiable. I have all
the wine
I need. If I ask to trade for some of yours, you will be winning gold
medals
with it and not want to part with any. If you
are a commercial winery, the same
rates apply, but there are minimum charge provisions and paid travel
time from my home in Anacortes. Send
me an e-mail. I will receive it on my cell phone and call you back.
Promise. paul@paultk.com
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