Any press is good press. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. — Phineas T. Barnum
I got some media coverage for using the tail, the ear, and the oink. —Mario Batali
How cool is this?! The leading wine-industry publication in the world, Wine Business Monthly, is featuring Magnolia Wine Services (my custom crush facility) in their January 2022 issue. The article follows our fearless young leader, Jack Sporer, in his quest to build a co-op of like-minded winemakers conscious about sustainable viticulture and minimal-intervention winemaking. It even has photos and a few quotes from yours truly!
To read the article, you can go to Wine Business Monthly and sign up for free digital access, or just click on the following pages below to enlarge each one to readable size.
Pretty good article, heh? I thought it was accurate and representative, at least in terms of how I’ve experienced Magnolia. My only complaint was being misquoted in the very last paragraph. The writer had the quote backwards, and had me saying:
“My biggest surprise is how much easier it is to make wine in smaller lots than in big lots,” Daniel said. Which doesn’t make any sense when what I say next is: “When you come here and have access to all the equipment, there’s a lot less chance for mistakes.”
What I actually said, and how it should have read, is: “My biggest surprise is how much easier it is to make wine in larger lots than in small lots,” Daniel said.
Remember that I've recently gone from being a small home winemaker making small lots of wine to being a larger commercial winemaker making much larger lots of wine. I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was to do things larger at Magnolia versus my tiny home-winemaking shed.
But, what are you gonna do? I only bring it up because it has been one of the biggest eye-openers for me on this crazy journey.
Before I actually did it, the idea of processing tons of grapes using big commercial winemaking equipment—forklifts, tanks, pumps, huge crushers, pneumatic presses, etc.—was very intimidating. Now, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Bigger is better, and the idea of making five or ten gallons of wine in my garage now seems far less controllable, and fraught with many more things that could go wrong, than making a hundred times that much wine at Magnolia.
Imagine that!