Wine Making Business

[Dean]

We have them all over British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia I believe. The main thing in the larger centers is that most people who live in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, live in high density areas, where having a single family house is usually not an option for them. So space is at a premium. This is where the Ferment on Premise comes in. You get to make wine, need no equipment, no skill, or anything else. You pitch the yeast, come back in a month and help bottle it. Then you take home 30 bottles of wine. The service is usually anywhere from $100 to $200 per batch plus the cost of the kit. However, since kits are made here in Canada, our kit cost can be quite a bit lower than what you'll see in the USA. A lot of these places sell kits at $10 to $20 above dealer cost to make the money on the service end of it.

Living space and our taxes on alcohol make this a very valid business in Canada. Most places around where I live all have competitive rates, yet all have been in business for a long time and all are quite profitable, so it seems there is enough business to share.

If state laws allowed it in your area, and it is full of high density housing, this could be a reality for some of you. However, with Charles Shaw and some other low cost wineries, you can't win the customers on price point, rather than having something that they "made on their own".

 

[Mark]

We have one here in SoCal, too.My cousin had a bottling party at the place for his birthday (everyone took the bottle they bottled home with them!), and I had been toying with the idea of wine making at the time but it seemed like they did all the funsteps. That's what enticed me to check the Internet, found George, and got hooked!

 

[wctisue]

A friend of mine started the franchise http://water2wine.us/in San Antonio and up into Austin. Very energetic individual. I worked for him at the store one summer during vacation time.


Same kits as we do but without the hassle for the customer. At least one pizza chain and one Italian restraurant use the W2W wine on their menu.


I've always believed its the TASTE and not the COST that drives the kit wine making industry. If the product tastes better AND you get a personalized label why not pay the same $ as you would at the grocery store but get a tastier wine???


Wayne

 

[dfwwino]

I agree with George. The concept is better suited for Canada, where many people have incentive to buy such wine because they can avoid the high taxes on alcohol. It makes no sense here because a person can buy a better tasting wine at less cost at the local liquor store. The only benefit is perhaps having your own wine label, having a novelty item to share with friends, or making wine for a wedding or the like. I've been to multiple D'Vine Wine locations in DFW. They are not using top concentrates, are not aging the wine properly before selling it, and are charging about 2 to 3 times the kit value at George's shop. So you are paying $75 to 100 for someone to rack and bottle for you. Many of the wines I tasted had kit taste and were not very good in quality. If I owned such a business, I think it would be very labor intensive and not rewarding. I have trouble enough handling 8 carboys at a time, rather than 200. Can you imagine going to work every day and washing carboys, sanitizing carboys, racking wine, bottling, every week of the year? I would only do it if I could afford from the start to hire low-skilled workers to do the grunt work, while I sold the wine and did the wine tastings. But most new businesses don't have such resources. If you want to run a winery, do the real thing. Buy an industrialfermentation tank, an industrial crusher and press, and accessories.Either purchase grapes from vineyards or bulk quantities of high quality concentrate or both. Make one large batch of a few varieties and sell the wine. This way, only portions of your year are dedicated to crushing, pressing, fermentation and bottling. The majority of your time can be spent on marketing. In the on premises approach, there is little economy of scale and the result is inferior wine for the price charged.

 

[Wade E]

I would rather do that then what I do but I know I would buy a few more toys to make that job easier like 1 of those sink do-hickeys that washes the carboys out, it would pay for itself. I would also have a few vacuum pumps like I have now spread out to handle the tasks of racking and other stuff. Id be afraid to open 1 but if it prospers somewhere then all the power to ya for having your own business.