Endless Summer Winery

[Midwest Vintner]

Lots of luck to you.

It seems to me that the best quality a person can have (for this) is patience.

Just think of this as paying the price for living the dream.

I had looked into starting a comercial winery in New Jersey. The cost and the amount of red tape (at the state level) are far too prohibitive!

johnT.

Yes, you have to be persistent and determined. I swear the gov't doesn't want you to open one. We have had blockages at every point! Not much left, but really the gov't is extremely abrasive in this process. They must be really dumb considering we pay taxes when we go to bottle AND sales tax when we sell wine. They are only getting licenses fees now, which will be nothing to the excise tax. Doesn't make any sense for them to be slow, unhelpful and generally not very nice. There have been a few agencies that have been what I expected, but many are far WORSE! When you have the ttb, atf, health department, dnr, fbi, federal, state and local governments all having some role in green lighting your business, it's no fun for sure.

We have racked up a serious bill doing this. We projected something like 120k at the lowend to 150k on the highend or so. We are over 150k invested thus far! We are very close now to just finishing up, though. Building is 7/8ths done, but missing some key materials that are "on order." We are not happy at this point with the builder due to these set backs and that they keep saying it will restart this day. The day comes and goes.....

There is only one hurtle I know of, so we are getting really close. Still, no dates as we just don't know when things are going to get done, then we have some stuff to do after that.

All that said, we have sweetened some of the wine and have all the bottles, etc. Bottling should be very soon.

 

[Midwest Vintner]

Building outside and roughed in electrical is done. We are doing the finishing work ourselves to save money (more fun! lol). We are awaiting state approval of labels, so that we can bottle. I'm not sure why the state is taking so long because the TTB has already approved the labels. More bureaucracy. Getting there, but still plenty to do!

 

[Runningwolf]

We need some pictures now that the walls and roof are on

 

[Dougxox]

Building outside and roughed in electrical is done. We are doing the finishing work ourselves to save money (more fun! lol). We are awaiting state approval of labels, so that we can bottle. I'm not sure why the state is taking so long because the TTB has already approved the labels. More bureaucracy. Getting there, but still plenty to do!

They don't have anybody left, most of liquor controll was let go and law enforecment duties were sent to the SHP and local authorties to enforce laws. In the end of May everyone left was processing liquor licence renewals. A winery near me sent in about 10 labels a few years ago, all with the same photo on them, only difference was the wine name, they accepted 7 and rejected 3. They sent in the same three and got approved the second time, no changes.

 

[grapeman]

I had sent in a label a few months ago and it took 6 weeks for them to act on it. It was rejected for corrections. They wanted a comma added in the warning statement. I had copied and pasted the statement from their own demo label, so if it needed a comma, so did their own label. I had seven labels approved befroe that without the comma. I once had a guy tell me he wanted a better description of the wine on the bottle. They are very fickle.

 

[Mike93YJ]

Is your winery going to participate in the winery passport program that MissouriWine.org puts on? We are planning on taking some trips soon to get our passports stamped when we visit wineries. I have no idea if the program costs the wineries that are in it or not, but it could be a way to get visitors to come by your place.

 

[Midwest Vintner]

Mike, I have not looked into that yet. Will do. I'm glad ya'll on here are giving me some information. I just don't have time to contact everyone and look for stuff. Soooo busy right now. On top of the winery, I'm working a night job, which includes overtime on Saturdays some weeks. My dad just isn't capable of getting too much done because he has had back surgury 16 months ago and had knee surgery 2 months ago. We are getting closer though.

Grapeman> I know what you mean. I had a few labels that were identicle as far as format, but the first ones passed and then the second ones "needed corrections?" Huh?

I REALLY hope it doesn't take too long to get the labels approved because we are wanting to bottle next week! Labels have been out for 3 weeks or more and are already approved by the ttb.

I will try to take some pics soon. Today is stain the concrete day....

 

[Midwest Vintner]

State approved the labels. ON TO BOTTLING!!!!!

We have alot to do still, but it's coming along. The floors are stained. Didn't work as good as I'd like (maybe we messed up mixing or something). It looks much better wet and that's what the directions said it would look like. Dunno why it's not like that. Very hard to see what it looks like from the pics. There isn't any lights inside, except what we use for building. Will get better pics when I have more time and we get more done!

Still working on the bar for the tasting room. Outside Dimensions 8' x 8' x 8' with 24" countertops.

 

[Midwest Vintner]

Update.

Just bottled for the first time, but our filling maching pump died (accident, F!). Gotta get a new one or fix it ASAP!!!!!!!!!!

the crew was beat when we started. All of us have jobs (minus my dad holding the bottle, but he was putting up panels the day before from 8 am to 11 pm!)

Our filler was working overtime, till we ran out of wine and it ran dry for a minute. The pump is supposed to always have fluid and it overheated I think. Worked after for a bit and then just stopped.

We've been working double time to get the tasting room done AND get bottling done. Looks like we might have a snag with the bottler on hold.

 

[Midwest Vintner]

The tasting room from the production building

A look from the drive up to the tasting room. It will be a one way entrance with an exit in front or our old barn (needs some work too!)

 

[Midwest Vintner]

We still have alot of work to do. Mostly now on the landscaping, parking, drive, trim/paint/accessories/ etc in the tasting room and to bottle. Stuff is getting done as fast as we can.

THIS IS ALL JUST A ROUGH VIEW. It will shape up.

 

[grapeman]

It all looks great! Before you know it you will be in business and selling wine. It has been a lot of work this summer getting folks out to try the wine and buy it. I am out in the boonies and hidden from view so it is hard to get folks to know we are there. Hopefully you are very visible from the road. I have been doing 5 farmers markets a week to promote the wine and it is working. Yesterday we had the first day of our Summer Wine Tour of area wineries and it began very strong. The whole family pitched in along with a friend and we managed OK. We had a couple hundred tasters and sold a lot of wine.

Best of luck to you and your family.

 

[Runningwolf]

WV those pictures are totally awesome and its nice to see all the hard work you put into in. The picture of the crew, is that you on the left?

Another question from the earlier picture when you were talking about the stain. Is that a concrete stain you are talking about on the front porch? Did it happen to be a Bher concrete stain. I used that product on my patio and was a transparent stain. It did not end up like the picture the product is unbelievable. Four years later it still looks as good as the day I put it down.

 

[Wade E]

Looking awesome over there! Congrats also to Rich on a great day.

 

[jtstar]

Your winery already looks great you and Grapeman are doing every winemakers dream

 

[Redtrk]

That's looking really good. I see another road trip in my future.

 

[Dougxox]

Is your winery going to participate in the winery passport program that MissouriWine.org puts on? We are planning on taking some trips soon to get our passports stamped when we visit wineries. I have no idea if the program costs the wineries that are in it or not, but it could be a way to get visitors to come by your place.

Wife and I just hit a bunch of winerys, up to 20 stamps. We started in March when they first came out. Need to hit the Hermann area for more stamps

With all the winerys in the area, could you beg, borrow or steal a pump???lol

Hope to see you soon.

 

[Midwest Vintner]

runningwolf>Not me in the pic. I took the pic. lol. I do have a pic of me in the "heres me" thread. The stain worked great, except it was supposed to have the look of "when it was wet." The sheen isn't glossy at all, so the floor looks more like dull redrock than a polished rock. That's the best way I can describe it. Looks better wet, IMO, but we couldn't figure out how to make it that way. The sealer did spot on us some too. Overall, it wasn't too hard, and looks ok. I'm more concerned with putting out the best product I can. I am not totally happy with all the wines, but I don't think I'll ever be either.

Grapeman>Glad to hear you did well. With all your knowledge, I'd expect the wine to be good and that should then help sell more of it! We are less than 1/2 mile from the largest road into Hermann (highway 19), so I think that should help. The road to our very short lane, is also a highway, so no backwoods driving. This is why we picked this location as it had the most easy access, yet still out in the country. The downside is that we don't have alot of land to do much with (3.75 acres). Further, we are only 8 miles from interstate 70 and between 70 and Hermann (19 goes from 70 south to Hermann). We are about 7 miles north of Hermann.

JTSTAR> I fantasize about getting some time to actually relax! Should be soon enough though.

Doug>might want to make your trip in October. October fest is big and it's every weekend in October, so you can decide which. We are hoping to be open before then. We've visited other wineries quite a few times, but I doubt they are too happy to have another winery out there. IMO, we are different enough that many will come for our wine and then visit Hermann (we are out of town, even though we have a hermann address). Some might come here and not like the non-grape wines? Idk why, but some just don't think it is a wine if it's not a grape. A co-worker, apparently a home wine maker and avid winery goer, thinks we need to incorporate other wineries wines at our tasting room to please those people. I dunno if I like that idea.

 

[roblloyd]

Do you guys have Groupon in your area? My local winery (Chamard in Clinton CT) just did a groupon a couple weeks ago. $20 for 2 to a tasting with a Reidel glass to keep. They sold over 7,000 of them.
They also have local musicians on weekend for music, some free, some a small cover.
Might be worth checking out to get the names out there and make some

 

[Dougxox]

MO liquor controll laws prohibit the use of coupons or any other types of "enticement" to promote alchol. Only normal advertising is permited. Its a pain in the butt, I run a liquor store and have to put up with it all the time.