Historically, the barrier to entry for owning a wine brand was astronomically high.  For hundreds of years, your only hope was to be the first male born into a wealthy, chateau-equipped family in France.  More recently, your chances were much better but still pretty bleak: you needed to be a brilliant Silicon Valley entrepreneur on the fast track to IPO or Google buyout. Provided you played your cards right, you ended up with more money and time than you ever dreamed of and suddenly felt a need to produce cult Cabernet in Napa Valley. Plop down $10 million for a prime spot in Oakville or Stag’s Leap, hire the best winemaker money could buy, and watch people line up on your email list to buy that $300 liquid gold.

In almost every sense, the wine industry has changed dramatically since even the nineties.  Wine brands don’t need their own facilities in order to make their own wine.  ‘Custom crush’ facilities dot the state of California, running from Lake County down through Napa and Sonoma, through the Central Valley and down into Temecula. Each of these facilities allows a brand to bring in their winemaker (or not), bring in the grapes, make a wine, bottle it, and bring the wine to market for a few dollars per case.  Still too expensive? Buy ready-made wine on the bulk market, then blend and bottle at a custom crush facility for pennies on the gallon.

This drastically changes the commercial wine landscape, as anyone with grapes or the money to buy some can have a brand.  But ‘custom crush’ has lowered the barrier to entry one step further: to the consumer.

Enter Crushpad, with the goal of “democratizing the wine industry.”  Starting in a huge warehouse facility in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, Crushpad secured grape contracts with some of the best vineyards in Northern California and worked on warming up the wine-loving public to making their own wine.  Just a barrel of wine, for as little as $5,700.  As it turns out, wine has a habit of making people want to get dirty sorting grapes, doing punch downs (literally punching down the skins so that more color is imparted into the wine), weighing the pros and cons of different yeast strains, and debating over barrel aging.  The Bay Area tech geeks apparently really like geeking out about grapes.

Taking a cue from the co-op model in France and Italy, Crushpad also capitalized on the community-building aspect of winemaking, and formed groups that shared barrels; there were neighborhood wines and even a Twitter wine.  The beauty of this model is that the customer can choose the level of involvement, from “I’m going to sleep on the floor next to my barrel” to “just make something impressive for me to send to my clients at Christmas.”

In 2010, Crushpad moved from San Francisco to the Napa Valley, and in 2011 to Sonoma.  For a large constituency of Crushpad’s clients, this was a big blow; there are dozens of places to custom crush in Napa and Sonoma, and the appeal of Crushpad was being able to visit and work on you wine before and after work in the city. It’ll be interesting to see how Crushpad reinvents itself.

But fear not, San Francisco would-be winemakers. All is not lost!   Enter Dogpatch WineWorks, the latest incarnation of consumer-driven custom crush in San Francisco. Led by Crushpad vet Dave Gifford, WineWorks is furiously preparing for the 2011 harvest with the hopes of bringing high-touch, high-service custom crush back to SF.

Dave brings a lazer-like focus on quality to WineWorks, and for the first harvest they are focusing on four varietals: Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and Chardonnay. Starting at $6,800 for a barrel of Russian River Chardonnay and topping out at $10,000 for a barrel of Atlas Peak Cabernet Sauvignon, Dave and his business partner have tried to pick distinctive vineyard sites. There is one big hole however: they have yet to secure and announce the resident winemakers.  This may be the democracy of wine, but winemaking works better as a dictatorship!

Widespread winemaking has crept into all fifty states, yet the consumer-driven custom crush model is one that will take a bit longer to grow.  That being said, there are a couple of facilities on the East Coast worth noting.

Make Wine With Us in Wallington, New Jersey is providing consumers a custom crush experience in a much more structured (and affordable) setting.  Sourcing grapes from California appellations in the fall and grapes from Chile in the spring, Make Wine With Us is able to bring the bottle cost down about 50% compared to Crushpad.  Clients choose to make either a half barrel or full barrel of wine and, contrasting with its California counterparts’ self-guided model, folks who sign on to make wine at Make Wine With Us attend four two-hour-long classes over the course of their winemaking journey.

A handful of New Yorkers were clients at Make Wine With Us in Jersey for a few years before they realized that the whole point of consumer-driven custom crush is for it to be nearby. They quit their day jobs, navigated a huge learning curve, and opened Brooklyn Winery in Fall 2010.  Brooklyn Winery’s model hinges on the idea that clients who want to be more involved will pay more for the privilege, and thus they’ve created four different winemaking ‘levels’, ranging from the Introductory which nets you a case of wine and three winemaking ‘parties’, up to the premium package that lets you get your hands dirty one-on-one with winemaker Conor McCormack for a full year of grapey goodness. It seems as if two distinctly different categories are emerging among the consumer-driven custom crush market: the first being a high-level educational one for novices, and the second being a more focused and ‘premium’ experience for the hobbyist.

As a winemaker and sommelier, questions arise about how they are shipping these grapes cross-country and cross-equator.  The mere weight of grapes upon each other in the bins post-harvest is enough to crush them. When your grapes are crushed, fermentation will naturally start, you’re getting skin contact on the juice, yadda yadda. Perhaps extended skin contact is good if you’re making Cabernet or Malbec, but not so much for your white wines. Food for thought.

We’ve gone from chateau, to IPO, to sophisticated custom crush to harvest party.  What’s next in this democratization and globalization of winemaking?

If I had to place my bet, I’d say that consumer-driven custom crush is going to enter the commercial winery’s own cellar.  Within ten years, we’ll be at a dinner party drinking an Oakville cab that a friend made alongside Daniel Baron in Silver Oak’s cellars. We’ll get sick of a coworker calling himself a ‘Rhone Ranger’ for making a killer Grenache while rubbing elbows with Randall Graham at Bonny Doon.  It’s already beginning at places like Judd’s Hill Winery, and it’s only going to get bigger.

I am concerned about what the growth of the ‘democratization of wine’ will have upon grape prices. Ten years ago, you may only have a handful of people trying to get their hands on a ton or two of grapes from a cult Cabernet Vineyard; with the opportunity for consumers to make their own barrel from such vineyards, the competition really starts to heat up.

More importantly are the implications on the consumer. On the one hand, more insight into the winemaking process makes a smarter consumer who will shop better, drink better, and ultimately appreciate their wine more fully.  But on the other hand, a consumer making a barrel per year is going to have a ton of that single wine to drink.  They won’t experience much else.

My biggest worry with the consumer winemaking trend is that there may come a time when all the mysteriousness, all the ancient traditions, agriculture, and complexity will be stipped away.  That when the consumer has the elements at their disposal, wine may cease to be anything more its very humble parts: sun, dirt, grapes and yeast.