Going, going, gone
We've completely sold out of four of our wines and six more are disappearing like smoke on the wind. Are we burning up, or burning down?
You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it. ~ Oprah Winfrey
If there is a 50-50 chance something can go wrong, then nine times out of 10, it will. ~ Paul Harvey
Fun with numbers
“So, how’s Tiny Vineyards Wine Company doing?”
“Fine. We’re having a great time.”
“No, I mean how’s it doing as a business?”
“Oh.”
“I was just wondering ‘cause you know, I hear the industry’s in the toilet right now and it’s a tough business to begin with. They say the quickest way to make a million bucks in the wine business is to start with two milli…”
“Stop!”
“What, you’ve heard that before?”
Yeah, anyone in the wine business has heard that “witty” quip… ad nauseam. In fact, some of us are a little sensitive to both the illusion and the germ of truth buried within that platitude. It seems to serve as a popular rejoinder nervous wine newbies always utter trying to fit in with a cohort of oenophiles.
But the truth is, for boutique winemakers, it’s actually a bit difficult to know how they’re really “doing” in their business. And for many reasons. That level of winemaking is so often conducted as an avocation of passion rather than a vocation of numbers. Milestones are measured differently than in conventional businesses and it relies on loose data that takes four to five years to have any significance.
A vintage picked in year one, goes through elevage (barrel aging) in year two, is bottled and aged some more in year three, and hopefully sold in years four and five. Only then do winemakers know if they’ve been successful. Along the way expenses are being accrued for the next vintage, and the next, and the next. And “sold” has a pretty loose connotation given that a bottle of wine might fetch any number of different prices, from 100% retail all the way down through the abysmal discounting for wholesale, brokered, delivered, COGS, loss-leader, and worse-than-free samples (gotta count shipping). To borrow from another oft-repeated idiom about making catastrophic errors, pushing a situation too far, or introducing a fatal flaw that causes a total breakdown—It’s all fun and games until someone divides by zero.
But I look at it differently. How is Tiny Vineyards Wine Company doing? Well, now that our first vintage is just a few months shy of that magical five-year timeline we’re coming really close to covering annual expenses with annual revenue in the low six figures.
But then again, I don’t pay myself anything so I guess this really is just an avocation instead of a real business.
But then again, I’ve got a LOT of inventory that is fully paid for. I could just sell it all over the next few years and rake it in.
But then again, I’ve got to use that revenue to finance future five-year-per-vintage growth. I guess this is a real business.
Oh damn, I’m way too old for this. How do I get off this train?
Putting it all into perspective
According to Wine Business Monthly’s 2025 Annual Review of the Industry the 50 top wineries in the world produce anywhere from 350,000 cases to 94 million cases of wine per year. The top 23 of those produce at least 1 million cases, with the top five producing 10 million or more cases annually.
Okay, because you’re obviously dying to ask me, those 94 million cases at the top were produced by Gallo. In the number two position is The Wine Group at less than half that number (40 million cases.) And number three, at less than half of that number (19 million cases), is Trinchero Family Estates. And it goes down quickly from there.
Worldwide there are an estimated 100,000 wineries operating across 60 countries. There are approximately 11,165 wineries in the United States, with 4,600 of those located in California. Half of all wineries are limited-production, producing less than 1,000 cases a year.
Tiny Vineyards Wine Company produced 1,156 cases last year.
And since the wine industry really is in the toilet, and has been for the past couple of years, and will probably be for at least another year or two—these numbers are all subject to erratic shifts.
So, unless you’re one of those few big boys of consolidation selling millions of cases of plonk, you’re likely one of the little guys, like me, trying to scratch out a living by selling your way-better-than-the-big-boys wine for anything over cost that you can get.
Let’s face it. It’s a very hard but worthwhile venture, which sometimes can even be magical—you start with a simple handful of grapes and you end up with a glass of inconceivable magnificence! For me, the ultimate satisfaction of winemaking is watching folks get excited about my wines when they have a taste, and then buying them for what they’re actually worth.
Am I trending or just treading water?
But back to the question: How do you measure success, or failure? A conventional financial statement doesn’t really give you a lot information because so much is based on projections and “what ifs.”
Since I’ve always written this newsletter as an open book on my successes and failures becoming a commercial winemaker and building a wine business, here’s a current snapshot of Tiny Vineyards Wine Company.
To date we’ve bottled approximately 1,810 cases of wine since our first commercial harvest of 2021—we’ve sold 621 of them. That’s 7,452 bottles of wine! Multiply that by any combination of price points you want and you’ll get some sense of revenue. Beyond the 1,189 bottled cases left to sell, we have another 1,372 cases worth of wine still aging in barrels. Is that good? Is that a heathy inventory timed perfectly to come on line when the wine industry recovers, or is it destined for overstock? Remember that frustrating five-year, slow food wine timeline—most of our inventory isn’t even close to being ready to release yet.
So for me, right now, a better measure of success is how “dynamic” our wines are at any given time. Are they evolving in a positive way and do people engage with them and want more? This may sound a little intuitive or supersensory but you can actually feel it when a certain wine is about to “go viral.” It might be a wine that has aged the perfect length of time and your regular repeat buyers have noticed and are posting positive comments, or it has caught the judges attention at prestigious competitions and won a few Gold Medals or high points ratings, or the media—social, conventional, or otherwise— has picked it up and given you your ten minutes of fame, or perhaps there’s something abstruse about the packaging that actually compels a wine shop to stock it and their customers to give it a try. Damned if I know what that is… “Awesome label, dude!”
If any of those things happen then word-of-mouth becomes fuel to the fire and your inventory starts to drop at an increasing rate
Of the ten wines shown above and noted below, four became quite dynamic and completely sold out very quickly, the other six are well on their way. There’s a reason this is happening and it’s akin to insider trading, only it’s perfectly legal if you want to go to tinyvineyards.com and act on that information!
2021 Eclipse Malbec - 72 cases made, SOLD OUT!
2021 Requisite Red - 147 cases made, only 56 left. With the proper aging protocol this perennial favorite with buyers has evolved into its finest moment. Seriously, this wine is the best it’s ever been!
2022 Daniel’s Pride Chardonnay - 47 cases made, SOLD OUT!
2022 Aerie Cabernet Sauvignon - 91 cases made, only 16 cases left. A total sleeper for the first three years and then suddenly—whatever alchemy happens to wine in the bottle—happened in a big way! So good, and so almost gone. We’re already arguing how much we’re going to keep for ourselves.
2023 Rosé of Zinfandel - 47 cases made, SOLD OUT!
2023 Wizined Zinfandel II (old woman label) - 50 cases made, only 27 left. Just released, there’s real energy building behind this wine, which is feeding off a new trend in Zinfandel towards higher acidity, lower alcohol and fresher fruitiness.
2024 Daniel’s Pride Vermentino - 65 cases made, SOLD OUT!
2024 Liberty Zinfandel - 90 cases made, only 55 left. This wine has transcended into the rarified air of a commemorative issue celebrating the 250th birthday of America by catching the collector fever that caused our 2021 Eclipse Malbec to sell out immediately celebrating the 2024 total eclipse seen across the country.
2025 Daniel’s Pride Albarino - 45 cases made, only 29 left. Destined to go the way of our 2024 Vermentino—only faster!—as buyers lean into a more European appreciation and flavor profile of lower alcohol aromatic whites as foodie wines that pair with anything.
2025 Rosé of Pinot Noir - 64 cases made, only 45 left. A French saignée-style Rosé made from extraordinary Russian River Pinot Noir. It is redefining the summer sipper as something ethereal, very dry not sweet, with bright acidity and unique flavors that surprise and satisfy!