Chateau Chez Vous

Loren Grossman, a wine enthusiast from New Jersey, knows the difference between Pinotage and Pinot Noir. He spends his vacations tippling through Napa and, if given the proper encouragement, will gleefully expound on the virtues of the Cote-Roties in his cellar. In restaurants, friends hand him the wine list because he knows which cult Cabernet goes with oxtail terrine. And although he fantasizes about buying a vineyard and making wine, California is just too far a commute from his home in Montclair.

Fortunately for Grossman, and for others maybe a tad less obsessed, you no longer need to buy a vineyard or even lay hands (or feet) on a grape to make your own wine. Thanks to a growing number of custom wine programs like the one at Crushpad—a self-proclaimed “luxury
wine-making facility” where you can be the winemaker—all you really need is a cellar and a dream.

“Ninety percent of our customers have never made wine and don’t know much about what goes into it before they start,” says Dave Gifford, the jeans-clad sales manager at Crushpad. We were sitting in a conference room at the Crushpad winery in San Francisco. On the table, barrel samples of a typical Meritage blend—Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, and Merlot—were lined up, ready to be blended to my particular tastes.

“Our job is to walk clients through the process, educating them as much as they’re interested,” he explains, waving a Merlot-filled pipette for emphasis.

As it turns out, wine aficionados from all over the country are extremely interested. When Crushpad winery opened for business three years ago, company founder Michael Brill’s vision was to provide the space and expertise for passionate wine enthusiasts to make their own custom wines. The wine lovers pay to have barrels made to their exact specifications, and Crushpad takes care of the rest. This includes sourcing the grapes (from prestigious vineyards such as To Kalon, White Hawk, and Amber Ridge), harvesting and sorting them, and overseeing every phase of vinification.

Would-be winemakers can choose to be as involved as they want, participating in all or none of the hundreds of decisions that go into making what Gifford calls “a mind-blowing barrel of wine,” with the winemakers at Crushpad as their personal consultants. Even better for busy urbanites, all of this can be done via phone and Internet. “We have customers who never make it out here to the winery, but we send them barrel samples so they can still make blending decisions,” says Gifford.

Out-of-town clients can also make use of several webcams installed by Crushpad, giving virtual winemakers a chance to watch over their grapes while they’re being harvested, pressed, and sorted, or their barrels while they’re being labeled and racked, from the comfort of their own home computers.

Loren Grossman is one such customer. An advertising professional in his regular life, Grossman dipped a toe into amateur winemaking by “adopting,” or purchasing, a barrel of ready-made cult Cabernet from Crushpad’s 2005 vintage. He labeled it in honor of his company and divided it among a group of seven colleagues. (Each barrel yields 25 cases of wine and costs $4,500 to $12,000, or $15 to $40 a bottle.) In 2006, he and a smaller group of three purchased some Syrah, for which they created their own custom blend that included 4 percent Viognier to mimic the great Cote-Roties in Grossman’s collection. And this year, he’s taking charge of an entire barrel of Pinot Noir by himself, getting involved in every aspect of vinification that he can, from choosing the vineyard to deciding at what Brix (or level of sugar content) to harvest to figuring out which yeast, if any, to add for fermentation.

“It’s like a drug,” Grossman tells me. “You start getting involved in degrees. Then, before you know it, you’re finding excuses to fly to California and sort the fruit, and pretty soon you’re investing in multiple barrels.”

Although Crushpad is the splashiest and most technologically adept blending facility, it’s not the only operation making custom wines for vineyard-less clients. Nor was it the first. Judd’s Hill in Napa and Urban Wineworks in Portland, Oregon, have had similar programs for years. And three new ones—Brutocao Cellars in Mendocino, California, and Kings Hill Cellars and Sonoma Grapemasters in Sonoma—are also joining the fray. Apparently everyone wants to blend their own.