2007 Bottling, continued

No frost.

This morning, I went to my Sonoma State Wine Business class. As I drove toward Cotati, I called (on my hands-free phone, of course) the custom crush winery where my 2007 wine is awaiting bottling.

I need to do the final blend on two lots of 96 gallons, a lot of 355 gallons, and a lot of about 1100 gallons. I was informed that the winery would not have enough tank space to blend the largest lot. Somebody would be coming on bottling day to remove the bigger tanks from the winery. "Okay," I said calmly, my guts beginning to churn. Then they asked me if I was going to run the sulfur dioxide (SO2) analysis. "Okay, I guess so." I had already paid them to run the lab tests. Not good.

I continued on to class. Instead of Technology in the Tasting Room, the topic was Winery Financial Management. VERY good class. The first handout was a schedule of accounts: a great starting place for someone who is trying to make sense of a business that runs more on ego and passion than on making a financial return. When I look at Financial Software like Quickbooks, it says to pick the categories. I scroll down. It doesn't say anything about barrels... Hmm.

Turns out that these generic business systems don't have a good way of dealing with one of the wine business' most idiosyncratic features: Inventory is a multi-year affair. Expenses incurred in growing grapes and making wine aren't deducted from income until the wine is sold. Until then, those expenses go into the Asset column as inventory. With red wines, this is a three-year span between incurring expenses and realizing income. Producing white wines is a bit shorter, and buying & bottling bulk wine has a much quicker turnaround.

There are some custom programs that work really well, with full integration of vineyard and winery operations, but they are really only cost effective for wineries producing at least 5000 cases. For us smaller ones, the message was: Excel is a good program!

Anyway, it was an eye-opening class, and it removed some of the confusion about where to begin getting the financial house in order.

After class, I drove to the winery. Good news. They postponed the pickup of the tanks, so I WILL be able to do my blending Monday morning! And my SO2 testing WILL be done late Monday. I'll bring the Free SO2 up to 40 parts per million, but before I do that (and after blending), I'll pull some pre-release samples - maybe a couple of cases. So I'll be there doing the sample bottling at about 1 pm on Monday. The bottling line arrives on Tuesday evening, and we will start bottling at about noon on Wednesday!