Drinks After Dark

Beyond Homemade: Alternatives for that premium wine experience.

by Colleen Coplick on August 16th, 2008

Township 7 has provided our “late morning wine” this morning. A lovely semillion, a rose and a private label red.

Brad Cooper, the winemaker for Township 7 (one of my favourite BC wine brands), is talking about how you can have the wine experience at home. If you add sugar to grapes and leave it for a while, you’ll get wine. It might not be good wine, but it’ll be wine.

Wine started out as a communal effort and continues as such today. The problem is, many of the wine we drink today is “factory” wine. Grapes go in, wine comes out, et voila. It’s not a bad thing, but we don’t have to drink it forever.

Consumers are a pendulum – they go from a Wolf Blass and run with the crowd, and then they go and find the small producers, from an old fashioned way of wine making, and start catering to their palate.

If you don’t want to make your own wine, you can commission your own wine. At the beginning, people begin buying from “boutique” wines – the smaller wineries.

Wine making is messy and dirty to make it from home. “The human foot is an excellent tool for crushing grapes. Incredibly gentle.” says Brad. His better idea is to make it at someone else’s home.

The best idea, if you can afford it, is to contact a winery or professional winemaker and they will do a “custom crush.” It’s gonna cost you though. You’re looking at 100$ an hour a for 10 cases of wine that will take 25-50 hours.

The newest thing is the Crushpad experience. Based in SF, they’re making wine for people in downtown SF. Crushpad provides grapes from the West Coast’s top vineyards, an industry-acclaimed wine making team and a state-of-the-art winery 100% focused on making wine in small lots. You choose your level of involvement and we do the rest. No matter where you live, you can now make your own wine.

The entire building is recycled. It’s hip with a capital H. It’s all in an urban setting, and they have crushed 700 tons which is about 40,000 cases of wine. In over 650 separate batches.

There are 10 winemakers on staff. They’re taking the whole “web 2.0” shtick, and turned it into Wine 2.0. They’re guaranteeing wine from Washington in Kiona Winery to be on the Crushpad in 12 hours.

This is really really cool and Gus and I have already decided we’re going to San Francisco. Crushpad is opening in Seattle soon as well. (oh. wait. we might not be able to bring our wine back.)

There are screens above the sorting tables where your winemaker can talk to you at any time. (Can you tell I’m really excited about this?)

Crushpad is, according to Brad, the hottest start up in the wine world. You can have your own “winery” though Crushpad. They’re waiting to expand into the wine regions across the states, and are getting ready for the plug and play wine business.

The main problem for Gus and I is that it’s only available in the states.

Sigh. I need a VC. I have two three projects to get up and running. Anyone wanna help a girl with three fantastic lifestyle brand ideas out?

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