Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness. ― Stephen Fry
The weekend it became real
If you were a 6-foot-tall naked contortionist weighing 200 pounds and you crawled into an empty standard-size 60-gallon wine barrel it would still take 35 gallons of wine to fill the barrel around you. That’s how big a 60-gallon barrel is—it holds the same amount of wine as a large bathtub holds water. The barrel alone weighs about 100 pounds. Filled with wine it weighs 600 pounds. Until I filled one, or perhaps even more telling—until I emptied one, the idea of a 60-gallon barrel of wine was an abstract concept. Sixty gallons of anything is a lot of thing.
Consider what we think about when we hold an unopened bottle of our favorite wine. It’s a treasure! Something we’re careful with, something special to be enjoyed. A case of that wine—12 bottles—well, that almost feels like too much of a good thing, not quite hedonistic, but close. And we’re quick to put it away for safe keeping, and perhaps to avoid judgement.
But 60 gallons of wine—300 bottles—well, that still blows me away.
Now think of that and put another zero on the end. That’s how much wine I currently have aging at Magnolia, my custom crush facility—nine barrels and four 15-gallon kegs—600 gallons of wine!
Of course, that’s actually nothing compared to what’s considered a tiny commercial winery. In fact you aren’t even deemed worthy of the descriptor “micro-winery” until you produce at least 1,000 cases, or 2,400 gallons, of wine a year. The big boys?—try 500,000 cases or 1.2 million gallons a year.
While these larger amounts are mostly unfathomable numbers to anyone, so is 600 gallons to me. I am having a hard time coming to grips with having made that much wine—and having to sell it. Will I be able to? Will it go quickly or will I end up with a garage full of wine nobody wants? Will it taste good enough to be commercially acceptable? Will it taste way better than that? Or do I “own” 600 gallons of plonk?
This is what keeps newbie boutique winemakers like myself awake at night—riding a rollercoaster of confidence that is constantly being derailed by inexperience.
So y’all remember my friend Bruce? He came out from Colorado during harvest for a visit, and to get his hands dirty and his wine whistle wetted. I wrote about it here. Well Bruce showed up again for a few days a couple of weeks ago to help me prune, and to perform some furtive due diligence in the form of a serious barrel tasting of everything we had picked, crushed and pressed five months ago.
You see, the hombre really wants to ride for the brand, and has been gently suggesting as much for many a month. I didn’t take it too seriously at first as I’ve kinda had my lifetime fill of investors and partnerships. When you connect with the rare right person it’s wonderful and the sum of one plus one is far greater than two—but the inverse is more often than not what you get. Plus I didn’t really need outside funding or a second set of hands. I planned to let Tiny Vineyards grow organically, keeping it small—a one man shop—and hopefully self-financing for the most part.
Or so I thought.
Then Bruce and I started talking, and talking, and talking. Seems he had a very real appreciation for what was involved in a commercial wine venture. And an even greater appreciation for the juice itself. Plus, he had reach. People in different parts of the country who trusted him, who would share a bottle of wine with him and be swayed by his enthusiasm for its origin. His kind of slow, southern-speak persuasion could sell wine—not in a huckster kind of way, but more in a folksy, unpretentious, Randy Newman sorta style.
Bruce was looking for an avocation, something beyond his very successful and continuing lifetime career as an architect. I was looking for something hands-on and timeless, something that could defy technology and social trends, and not make me wish I had been born 50 years earlier—as my own career in the media arts often did.
The epiphany came when we walked into the barrel room at Magnolia two weeks ago this past Friday. I prepared a roller-tray of wine glasses, fresh water, spit buckets and a glass wine thief. We were there to taste four wines that had been aging in French oak for only about four months—Malbec, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and a proprietary red blend of Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah.