Total Wine is here!

[ibglowin]

So this weekend Total Wine opened its doors down in ABQ. If you haven't ever seen one of these stores its quite the sight to behold if you like wine and or spirits or beer. They opened up in an old Borders Books location. The store is 23,000 ft2 in size. Its HUGE! 8000 bottles of wine, 3000 bottles of spirits, 3000 bottles of beer, a walk in humidor for cigars.

They have stores in 15 states mostly along the east coast, west coast and the southwest. Prices are pretty good on the $10-18 range bottles of wine, not so good on the high end wines. They are running some pretty good coupons like $10 off every $50 in wine purchased. They do tastings on the weekends. Really a fun place to kill some time!

 

[Pumpkinman]

Mike,
Sounds like Viscount Liquors here in Poughkeepsie, Housed in a forty thousand square foot building with twenty-three thousand square feet of selling floor! It's a great place to get lost in.

 

[Bartman]

Places like that should give anyone thinking they could start a winemaking business from their backyard, some pause. There is TONS of competition out there vying for those wine-consumer's money - standing out as a small artisan winery is really hard. And it's harder to make a profit selling a $10-$18 bottle if you are only producing 500 cases or so year.

 

[Runningwolf]

500 cases? Thats only 1200 gallons. Yes that would be pretty tough. Hopefully thety would be using there own grapes and processing them.

 

[Bartman]

Dan, Once you go beyond ~500 cases, the labor and equipment expense start to really ramp up. 2-3 acres of fertile grape vines is all one person can handle on their own, without significant equipment investment (some with greater experience may disagree); you get to 5 acres, and as I understand you will need substantial outside labor help and/or mechanical assistance. Approx. 2.5 acres should yield ~8-9 tons of grapes (depends on a several variables of course), which would yield roughly 6,000 bottles/1,200 gal of wine. If you do all that yourself, you might be able to make a decent profit on $15 bottles, but not much after marketing, packaging, transport, insurance, licensing, storage space and overhead costs. If you start adding the not-insignificant costs of outside labor or equipment investments, the profit dries up pretty quick, or else you have to sell for $20-$25/bottle.

 

[ibglowin]

Bart,

They have one in the DFW area (Northpark). I give them extra Kudo's for going the extra mile to showcase local wines. My first visit to a TW store was in Seattle and they had an amazing section(s) on WA state wines. They have the better part of an aisle in ABQ with all NM wines. The local wineries appreciate the support let me tell you. It's a tough market out there for a small winery to try and make a go of it. You can have a fantastic product but if you don't have a distributer to help push it you will have a hard time on your own surviving with just winery sales. You have got to get stocked in the local markets as well.

 

[DoctorCAD]

Well, there goes your extra spending money!