You Even Design the Label
If you thought making wine in your kitchen was exciting (see Is it Wine Yet?) how about becoming a real winemaker without the fuss of actually having a vineyard. There’s a company in California called Crushpad, located in the heart of San Francisco, where you can do just that.
While making your own wine will be fun and exciting, at Crushpad it's also serious business. You won't be alone when you set out to create that perfect cult wine: Crushpad provides grapes from California's top vineyards, they have their own winemaking team, and a state-of-the-art winery. You choose your level of involvement and they “do the rest.” Their very robust web site is great at getting the juices flowing (sorry, couldn’t resist that one), whether you’re a new winemaker or an experienced one. They tell us:
While there are many options and decisions to be made from vineyard to bottle, the basic steps to winemaking have not changed all that much in the past couple thousand years. In fact, turning grapes into wine is actually a pretty straightforward process. You squish some grapes and let the yeasts do all the work by turning the grapes into alcohol and a multitude of other things. Making fantastic wines that are complex, concentrated and age with grace is a little more complex - and that's what we're here to help with.
Crushpad provides materials, facility and services to produce your own wines. To get you started they’ve created a resource called the Crushpad 30 to help you in your winemaking decisions.
How about costs? Cost varies depending upon vineyard, with most barrels (25 cases) ranging from $4500 to $9,900 ($15 to $33/bottle). At the highest end of Custom Wine, Crushpad offers My Cult Cab.
Crushpad is an interesting concept and if you’d like to get more involved in the wine process and the wines you drink, visit their site. Crushpadwine.com. You can hear Crushpad founder Michael Brill talking with Linda Wertheimer on NPR’s Weekend Edition at Now You Can Craft Your Own Barrel of Wine.
Cheers.