How we started Icellars- Part 3

Hello,

Today is Part 3 of how we got into wine business. To learn quickly about wine/vineyard we subscribed to almost all wine magazines like Wine Business, Decanter, Wine Spectator, Wines&Vines and many more. We ordered every book on wine on the internet. Sometimes I was reading two books side by side. Many times I reread the books I liked the most. I found the most interesting ones those written by people who entered into wine business from another carrier who made so many mistakes and still succeeded.

I started speaking to more local people. I was learning I need to develop a detailed plan for a winery. First thing I needed was to install drainage. I contacted two local drainage contractors to get their opinions, suggestions and quotes. One of them was a mid 40s man with a big truck and full of mouth. He was saying I could grow cabs here. I asked him what is a cab? He looked at me as looking at the foolest man in the world; it is Cabernet man.

The other man was quite aged looking like in his early seventies. He was the total opposite of the first guy. He was talking slowly and explaining everything in very understandable terms. I liked him from the first moment.

When both quotes came, I was then certain the younger man was seeing me as his lotto win with open ended prices. On the other hand, the older man gave me a reasonable fixed price for the total 20 acres of tile drainage. He also offered to do my proposed winery building’s excavation works.

Anyways, I still consider myself very lucky to meet and work with Rudy Kasper. Rudy has been doing all kind of works in our vineyard for the last 12 years. Believe or not we have never signed a contract Including the first job. In the following years, we even did not talk what would be the cost. I tell him what I need. A few months after he completes his work, he would come with his time sheets and in less than 30 minutes we could agree on a number mostly in a few hundred thousands dollar range with cheques signed. Our vineyard now has 110 km of 4” tile drainage on every vine row.

As soon as we signed the land purchase agreement, we started designing the winery building. One thing I noticed in the books I was reading, a common regret they had built too small and had to expand their buildings within a few years. In our calculations 10,000 sqf building would be more than enough to contain retail, crushpad, barrel storage and barn. But after reading those regrets we designed our building to be 20,000 sqf. Its roof was also an odd single slope one like an unfinished building. For years visitors joked when we would build the other half. As you probably have seen, our building is a very simple but functional rectangle. Not an ornamental building in any way but with very high tech components like integrated rooftop solar, geothermal heating&cooling, rainwater collection, state of art wastewater treatment system, in floor heating&cooling. This simple building was chosen by the town of NOTL in 2018 as the best designed winery building.