potrero view
Photo courtesy of Crushpad.

Photo courtesy of Crushpad.

July 2008

Do-It-Yourself Wine Making

By Elias Stahl

People who love wine to such a degree that they want to create their own, and even casual wine lovers, will want to visit Crushpad.  Located in Dogpatch, Crushpad is a bustling warehouse in which wine is made, from the collecting and destemming of the grapes to the labeling and packaging of the finished bottles. There’s no reason to have a winery in the middle of an expensive urban area except to allow wine lovers to come by and make a bottle, or three hundred, for themselves. Crushpad is a do-it-yourself wine maker, willing to provide as much help as you’d like in the process of making your own wine.  Hayden Moulds, CrushPad’s Marketing Manager, explained that the winery’s mission is to “enable wine enthusiasts to make their own luxury-class wine”. Crushpad’s staff of seven expert winemakers and cellar masters are available to assist amateur winemakers through the process of turning grapes into a professional bottle.

Making wine is a straight-forward process, though creating good wine is challenging.  A winemaker must first select the type of wine, be it a syrah, a cabernet sauvignon, or a chardonnay, they wish to make.  Crushpad offers 16 different types of grapes, red and white, which it obtains from vineyards located in California, Oregon, and Washington.  The grapes are destemmed and fermented, pressed and put into barrels.  You can make the chemical estimations essential in winemaking – such as the calculation of the malolactic acids and the tannins desired, which will affect your wine’s body and taste – or leave it to the Crushpad staff. The resulting wine can be aged anywhere from eight months to two years.

After the wine has been aged in oak barrels to your preference, it’s bottled, corked, and labeled. The end product is a finished bottle of wine, built, assembled, aged, packaged, and labeled to your specifications.  Crushpad makes it possible for someone with little time, some money, and a spark of creativity or curiosity to play a hand in making their own wine.

Crushpad charges $5,700 to $10,900 to make a barrel, 25 cases, of wine, and customers have to make at least one barrel.  However, individuals can group together to sponsor and split a barrel.  And for a limited time the winery is offering “Community Crush,” in which Potrero Hill residents and workers can purchase up to three bottles for $19 a bottle, with two-thirds of the proceeds going to local nonprofits.

While Crushpad offers a high-end wine making service, for those with less resources wine can be made from scratch in your garage for significantly less money.  An eight gallon batch of wine, yielding up to three cases (36 bottles of wine), can cost as little as $150, including all equipment purchases and rentals as well as picking the hundred pounds of grapes yourself. Stores located in the East Bay and San Francisco, such as Oak Barrel Winecraft in Berkeley or Brewcraft in the Richmond District, can offer helpful advice, and sell or rent the equipment and tools necessary to make your own wine.  It’s a lot more work, but a lot less money, and you may take more pride in the outcome.  But you have to be willing to make a few mistakes without the support of a sophisticated winemaker.

For those of a more perfectionist nature, and who desire a crisper and more professional end product, Crushpad is the right place.  You can take a closer look at Crushpad at its website www.crushpadwine.com, or to participate in Community Crush go to www.potrerowine.com.  A great glass of your own wine is never far away; all it takes is a little daring and initiative. As Moulds put it, “Winemaking can happen anywhere.”

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