After the hustle & bustle of the holidays, the tasting room can seem a bit quiet. January and February are typically the slowest months of the year for a winery. The vineyard looks like a bunch of sticks. The days are short and cold. People are generally not out looking for things to do. Sales →

Hello Everyone! It’s been a while since I blogged last. I’ve had a busy summer and a great harvest season doing what I love. I’ve been working with a winery in West Texas helping them expand and it’s been fun – even in the sweltering Texas heat. I’m putting together a series on the planning, →

How about bringing a bit of European tradition to your winery this harvest by making a small batch of nouveau wine? When we think of nouveau wine, we often think of Beaujolais. This is not because nouveau wine originated there, but mostly because Beaujolais has done an excellent job of marketing. Germany and Portugal are →

The growing season in most states is in full swing now and you’ll soon need to be ready for harvest and crush. The problem is, it’s like getting prepared after you’ve received the hurricane warning – it IS happening, you just don’t when it will strike. The grapes are ripening, but the fruit won’t be →

Festivals.  Are you participating in local and regional wine festivals? If you’re not, you should be. Festivals are a great way to have your wine tasted by lots of people in a short period of time. Attendees of wine and food festivals actually enjoy wine and food – go figure! 😉 And they are excited →

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Grape Day at Newsom Vineyards, up west of Lubbock in the Texas Panhandle – pretty much in the middle of nowhere. But it was worth the trip – several great speakers (Dr. Andy Walker from UC Davis, Dr. Richard Becker of Becker Vineyards, and many others), interesting people, →

Love or hate the 100 point system, Robert Parker’s rise to dominating the wine critics’ world has changed the way we think about wine, what we buy and the resources we use to make our wine-buying choices. His influence is so great that what he says about wines can actually shift markets around the world, →

This is final blog in this series: Three Ways to Produce Positive ROI in Half the Time or Less. We previously broke down how a traditional winery is actually three separate businesses – growing grapes, making wine and retailing. Using this traditional model, you invest in all three businesses in a series and that it →

Discussed previously in the first blog of this series, Three Ways to Produce Positive ROI in Half the Time or Less, we broke down that a traditional winery is actually three separate businesses – growing grapes, making wine and retailing. Using this traditional model, you invest in all three businesses in series and that it →

In Part 1 of Three Ways to Produce Positive ROI in Half the Time or Less, we discussed the traditional method for building a winery and vineyard from scratch and reviewed cash flow from year 1 through year 10. We saw that, if starting from scratch and planting a vineyard, making wine from your own →