Cetera wine made simple ae (keane Y x for pairing plus 67 ps wine- Thy EM oes insTRENDS Winemaking 90 How to Bea Citizen Winemaker You don’t need a chateau, an enology degree or evena single vine to make wine anymore, thanks to companies for the everyman like San Francisco's Crushpad. by chip brown ROBABLY EVERYONE WITH A PAS wine has daydreamed of making his ot her own, ifonly fora moment. But the legal, tech- nical and financial barriers have been pro- . For decades states have had laws capping the number of wineries. (Until 1981 ON FOR hibitively steep in the U New Jersey allowed only one winery per million people.) Many would-be winemakers couldnt afford to quit their day jobs, or lived in cities far from vineyards or didn't know the first thing about the process. But today, we may be in the midst of the biggest and most democratie winemaking boom since the end of Pro- hibition, Relaxed laws and new companies that hold your hand through the process mean it's now possible to make FOOD & WINE + OCTOBER 2007 Michael Brill is the founder of Crushpad, the DIY San Francisco winemaking company that will soon expand to Seattle and New York. ‘great wine (or at least very good wine) without spending a fortune. Legions of wine lovers a learning how to measure Brix and motivate sluggish yeast. Making wine seems to have settled into the psychologi occupied by sports cars and adventure travel. While many new winemakers simply want to try their hand at a new hobby, others have larger ambitions. In the past decade the num- ber of commercial wineries in the U.S. has doubled to 5,110, for instance, and the *Wine- making for Distance Learners” course at the University of California at Davis, which began in 1998, has such a backlog of applicants that administrators say they are “s brochures lest they further inflame demand Ifthis winemaking movement has a leader, it is a do-it-yourself company in San Francisco called Crushpad that, since itopened in March 2004, has helped ‘more than 3,000 customers create their own wine. Next year, Crushpad will launch a second facility in Seat- tle, and a third is being planned for the conspicuously farm-free borough of Manhattan. The company is even considering bringin, program to that most aristocratic of wine bastions, Bordeaux. Crushpad isa radical departure from the typical custom, crush facility, in which wine producers truck in their own grapes, have them pressed into juice and stored in barrels, Itoffers the complete gamut of winemaking services: grapes from top-notch sources such as the famous Napa vineyard To Kalon; consultations with a staff of resident enologists; cooperage, bottling, label design, legal and marketing ; storage facilities; and even the back-office I niche once cared” to print democratic assistan ‘The com- chores necessary for online sales and shippin; pany is as much a school for new vintners as it is a winery, thas broken the process of winemaking down into 30 key Chip Brown's last article for Few, “My Parents Are Driving Me to Drink," was anthologized in Best Food Writing 2006. FOODANDWINE.COMTRENDS Winemaking 92 decisions—the so-called Crushpad 30—and at each step, customers can be as involved or uninvolved as they wish. The company’s sophisticated Web site (crushpadwine. com) includes a social network (crushnet.com) where new ‘winemakers can trade advice and ask questions. “This is our fourth harvest” said Michael Brill, Crush- pad’s 42-year-old founder, as we walked around the com- pany’s newly leased 34,000-square-foot plant across the street from a not-very-bucolie Pacific Gas and Electric substation in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Fran- cisco. An awning was being installed over the front door— in time, Brill hoped, for the open house the next day. Barrels were stacked in long rows, each with a plastie stabilizer in case of an earthquake, and a computerized record of fermentation data stapled on the barrelhead like a hospi- tal medical chart at the end of the bed. “We now make about 30,000 cases of between 600 and 650 different wines— more varieties than any winery in the world, he said. “The minimum customers have to make is one barrel, which is about 24 or 25 cases.” The cost of making a barrel of wine ranges from $4,500 to $15,000, depending on the grapes ‘and other factors, like how much new oak is used. That works out to a per-bottle price of between $15 and $50. Half of Crushpad’s customers are consumers who, with cult-like uniformity, all report having a “passion” for wine. ‘The other half are commercial clients—new winemakers, restaurants and retail wine shops that want to sell custom bottles. “We've hardly done any marketing,” Brill told me. “Seventy-five percent of our business comes from word of mouth. Most of our clients are pretty affluent and are part of the creative class. Two-thirds are male; 40 percent come from the Bay Area, but we have people from 35 states and eight different countries—Japan, Aruba, Italy. ‘There’ a guy in Finland making wine with us. We have webcams set up around the plant, and he watches his ‘grapes being pressed on his computer’ What's most radical is what Brill only half-jokingly refers to as Crushpad’s “plan for global domination.” ‘The winery is to the traditional supply chain of wine man- ‘ufacture and distribution what iTunes is to the music industry: Its economie model puts customers in charge. Customers put up the money for the grapes, and they decide on the kind of wine they want. This proactive role ‘stands in stark contrast with the old way of consuming ‘wine, which was basically taking whatever the industry (notably distributors, retailers and critics) decreed as market-worthy. Brill wrote the company’s manifesto FOOD & WINE * OCTOBER 2007 himself: “[We] want to liberate winemaking from the stereotype of the fifth-generation wine family living on the chateau with the golden retriever. By bringing wine- ‘making to the city, augmenting it with education and support, and taking care of the time-consuming parts, we ‘want to enable anyone with a serious interest in wine to participate in the magic of winemaking” “1d rather have 1,000 people making 500 cases and selling into their local markets than 50 people making 10,000 cases,’ Brill said as we stopped in front of a display case of Crushpad wines. Many had beautiful labels and unorthodox names like Howling Woodchuck and Earnest 66There’s a guy in Finland making wine with us,” says Crushpad’s Michael Brill. “We have webcams set up around the plant, and he watches his grapes being pressed on his computer.99 Birdbox, or the sort of names you see on bankers’ boats: ‘Wanderlust, Winderlea, L’Arbitrage and Pinot Envy. Brill sketched out some of the bios behind the bottles. “Equilib- rium was made by a guy who worked for Yahoo, Thur- manator by a big-league sports agent. Vinos D was produced by a group of wine enthusiasts from Genentech, Kitchak Cellars comes from a Minneapolis real estate law- yer and his partner, who isa plastic surgeon. Jean Edwards 2004 Cabernet, which got a 92 from Wine Spectator, was made by Karen and John Troisi. They live in Montville, New Jersey. That Cabernet called Life is made by Vin Hoover. He lives six blocks from my mom in Tampa.” Brill began making wine in 2003 when a financial software company he helped launch, TransactPlus, began to fail after the tech bubble burst. Hed had an epiphany years before over a glass of 1987 Chateau Chevre, a Napa Valley Merlot. Thinking it would be cool to grow grapes in his backyard in the Potrero Hill area of ‘San Francisco, he ripped out a 30-foot avocado tree, a fig tree and some rosebushes and planted six rows of Pinot Noir. He read Jeff Cox's book From Vines to Wines, With ‘grapes he bought in Napa and the Russian River Valley, he made his first wine in his garage, with a lot of help from Tracey Brandt and her husband, Jared. Tracey, who would eventually serve as Crushpad’s first director of sales and marketing, had worked at TransactPlus, and then in 2001 had taken off for France with Jared and interned with the celebrated Rhone winemaker Brie FOODANDWINE.COM