Do You Want to be a Winemaker?


Let's say you want to be a winemaker. What will you need to make wine? Well, first you'll need ...

Land

Just like you can't grow good peaches in the tropics, you can't grow good wine grapes just anywhere. Generally, you need a large patch of fertile-but-not-too-fertile soil that's well drained and close to a source of water. Preferably, you'd like a parcel on a slope that faces North (at least if you're in the Southern Hemisphere), so that the vineyard gets sun all day long. And you'd probably like to have it in a proven winegrowing area if possible. Luckily for Australia there are so many different Regions spread around the Country that you’re likely to find one close to home so long as you live south of the Southern Queensland and away from the red centre.

You'd better have a fat bank account, as unplanted land—which is a little tough to find these days, given the competition between wineries and land preservation laws— can be quite expensive, although highly variable by area, expect to pay from A$10,000 to A$100,000 per acre/.

TIP: The cost of wine partly depends on where the vines grow and what sort of vines they are. Some places and some varieties pull in far higher prices than others.

So you buy your land. Now you have to plant it.

Plants

What are you going to plant?. For good clones, you'll pay $2 (AUD) to $3 per plant. At 1,000 plants per acre, that's A$2,000 to A$3,000 for a single acre. Plus you have to get them into the ground. So you've got to till the land, level it, put posts and trellises in, run an irrigation system, dig little holes and plant the seedlings, and then wrap them in some sort of protective barrier (usually plastic tubing) to keep animals from nibbling at them. Estimate about A$20,000 per acre in labor alone to get all this done.

Now that you've spent all that money on one acre of vineyard, guess what? You get to sit and wait, as it'll be a few years before those plants produce grapes worth making wine out of, and a few more years again before the grapes are really good. All along, you'll have to prune the vines, pound stakes into the ground, run trellising, and replant the vines that die, as some will, regardless of how well you care for them.

Perhaps you're impatient and can't afford to sit on your investment for so long. Perhaps you'll just buy some grapes, and make wine from them while you wait. Good idea. But first you need some place to make the wine.

Winery

Let's assume you're not going to engage a top architect in the building of your winery;, let's settle on a more modest goal: a shed someplace nearby, so that you don't have to haul your grapes long distances in trucks where they might bake and begin to fester along the way.

In that little shed, you're going to need equipment.

Equipment

The first thing you'll need is a crusher-destemmer (for a small used one, figure about A$10,000). Then something to ferment the wine in (let's say a bare-bones 1,500 gallon stainless-steel fermenter, and the stand it needs to sit on, for A$4,000 or so), and some yeast with which to make it ferment. (You could hope for ambient yeasts to work their magic, but you may increase your risk of bacterial spoilage or other complications, which would ruin the wine.)

After the wine has finished fermenting, you'll have to get it out of that tank (one hose and pump, plus hose adaptors, clamps, and gaskets, about $16,000) and into some barrels.

Barrels = Big Money

Barrels are big money. They aren't strictly necessary, of course: If you want a simple, fruity, drink-now wine, you can skip the barrels and stick with stainless steel, which should last 20 years or more with good maintenance. But if you're aiming for a fine Cabernet Sauvignon, you'll likely want oak barrels for the fine smoothness they lend a wine, the hints of flavor that add complexity, and the bit of wood tannins they can add to the wine's structure.

What kind of oak you choose will greatly affect the cost. For an average-size barrel (60 gallons), the highly sought-after French barrels run about $800. Eastern European barrels run about $500. Australian oak can cost as little as $300, but better-quality barrels can cost as much as the French.

If you make just one tank of wine, you'll need 25 barrels. That's a minimum of $7,500 on barrels. And unlike stainless-steel tanks, barrels wear out. You'll have to buy some new ones to take the place of the old every year if you want your wines to taste similar year to year.

So you can already see how the costs of making a fine wine stack up. You want the best vineyards, the best plants, the best machinery, and the best barrels, and you'll pay much more than you would were you to grow some Concord grapes, ferment them in stainless steel, and bottle without them ever seeing the inside of an oak barrel.

But we've only begun. Once you have the basic equipment (and remember that we haven't included stuff like rakes and shovels with which to rake out the tanks, trucks with which you'll transport grapes, equipment, people, and such), you need grapes.

Getting Good Grapes

While you're waiting for your vineyards to come "on-line," and produce good wine grapes, you can buy grapes from someone else. If you want Cabernet Sauvignon grapes of the quality you hope to grow, you're going to pay through the nose. One ton of grapes makes about 750 bottles of wine, so you'll need a few tons at least.

Conclusion 

Well, wine making is an expensive business, we’ve covered a range of costs here but there are many others like water, power, staff and other such things that are very variable. But, with Australia having 2000 odd wineries it’s a way of life many people are happy with, if you’ve got your own winery you’ll certainly never be short of a drop or two!