Crushpad is a company in San Francisco that gives wine enthusiasts, with or without experience making wine, the opportunity to produce barrels of wine for their own consumption or for resale. Crushpad can manage the whole process. The prospective winemaker can take on as much responsibility as they wish by making most or all of the decisions and doing much of the work. Usually it’s a joint effort with Crushpad handling quite a bit. 90% of Crushpad’s first-time clients have no previous winemaking experience.

Crushpad works out grape availability on the winemakers’ behalf. There are fourteen different varietals to choose from and the winemakers can also select which vineyards to take them from. There are scores of different vineyards (California, Oregon and Washington) from which to choose. Pricing for the grapes depends on the varietal, the vineyard and the year. Some of the best appellations in the country are represented, as are some of the best vineyards. For 2005, there was even To Kalon Cabernet Sauvignon available.

The minimum level of production is, of course, a barrel (25 cases, 300 bottles). Winemakers can choose to make more than one barrel. They can also choose to join in with a group collaborating on a single barrel in order to reduce their personal financial and bottle-owning obligations.

Crushpad customers get to make choices about the harvest time, fruit sorting, crush, fermentation, press, winemaking styles, barrels, blends bottles, labels and more. The overall price per barrel depends on all those decisions, but ranges from about $5,700 to $10,900. Available Crushpad services can handle everything from the fermentation and winemaking through aging, package design and liquor laws compliance. And for $14,900 per barrel, you can make “My Cult Cab” which involves a specialized, no-holds barred, attention-to-minute-detail approach that will allow you to turn out a luxury-level Bordeaux-style blend that will “wow” your friends and impress a discriminating sommelier.

If you are interested in actually selling your wine, Crushpad Commerce can help with that. With their assistance and advice you make the wine and create a brand while they satisfy the Feds and even handle order fulfillment and distribution of the proceeds. They won’t sell the wine for you though. So, be ready to don your sales and marketing cap.

All of this probably sounds very exciting, and it is. But, what is the execution like? More importantly, what is the wine like? Can one team of in-house winemakers in a relatively small facility help dozens of different people make wines from fourteen varietals and fifty vineyards and have it all be good? And can the wines be different from each other? Can they truly exhibit the hallmarks of both the terroir and the varietal while also showing the impact of the individual winemaker’s decisions?

That’s what we were wondering as we headed to Crushpad last Thursday night. They were playing host at their facility for the coming-out party of the San Francisco Wine Association (SFWA). This new association with sixteen charter member “wineries” focuses just on operations that make their wine in that famous agricultural center: downtown San Francisco. Not all of the wineries use Crushpad, but many do. Fourteen of those wineries were pouring on Thursday. NorCal Wine was there to taste and report.

We’ll have a report on the SFWA in a forthcoming article. But, we can make a few things clear right now. Crushpad, the San Francisco Wine Association and their collective wines are for real. We tasted no less than 40 wines. Every single one was good. Some were better than others to our palates, but we would be happy to drink any of them. By and large, they are all good values at their full retail price. Some of the wines were truly exceptional. Some are a steal.

We were also pleased that vineyards which we were familiar with from non-Crushpad offerings, say Stolpman Vineyard and White Hawk Vineyard Syrah or Sleepy Hollow Vineyard Chardonnay, were very representative of those vineyards. And, in situations where multiple wineries sourced the same varietal from the same vineyard, as was the case with Amber Ridge Vineyard (Russian River Valley) Pinot Noir from Pug Wine and Connor Brennan Cellars, both wines were quite nice and had clear commonalities but were at the same time very different. So, if you have a bug to make your own wine but don’t want to kick your car out of the garage to do so, you should definitely give a thought to Crushpad.

And, while you’re waiting for our upcoming details on the SFWA, let us leave you with a little tease. You cannot go wrong by picking up some of the following (in alphabetical order):

• Connor Brennan Cellars Pinot Noir Amber Ridge Vineyards, $42
• Guy Riedel Wines 2005 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, $50
• Seawind Wines 2006 Chardonnay, Sleepy Hollow Vineyard, $29

If you were going to make your own wine, what varietal would you choose and why?

This article is original to NorCalWine.com. Copyright 2008 NorCal Wine. All rights reserved.

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