Growth limit
What’s this? A business putting a limit on its own growth? Madness! Considering we grow our own vines, and there are finite limits on how many vines we can grow, we thought it would make environmental and economic sense to come up with a growth target. Something corporations should do, but alas, we’re not yet the king and queen of the world…
1. Fully plant out our current vineyard
We currently have around 500 plots available for vines within our current trellis system. We’ve established a nursery to grow cuttings to plant into these plots, but realistically it will take at least 5 years to get these spots established. This is due to:
- Limits to water: Whilst our mature vines aren’t irrigated, drip irrigation for establishing young vines is a must. We have about 60,000 L of rainwater that we can use for drip irrigation. Setting drippers at 2L/hr gives a usage of 1000L/hr if we were to establish all in one season. That’s less than 3 days worth.
- Cutting failure rates: Young vines need a lot of care, and even in the right conditions, some will fail for many reasons. For example, we planted out 50 Durif cuttings directly into the vineyard with only 8 surviving – these had no establishment years in a nursery and were not irrigated, so we should have better rates this season.
- Irrigation infrastructure: Main lines and pumps are ready, but drip lines have not been installed, and we may not have enough to cover the entire vineyard. We’ll start with the most empty rows for efficiency and then maybe run individual lines off to isolated spots. We may not be able to run 500 drippers from our current pump given the main line size and the head, but we’ll figure that out!
2. Expand winery
Our cool room has space for 8 casks and currently has 6 full, so we’re approaching capacity already given that most of our reds spend 1.5-2.5 years in oak. Considering the size of our winery, it’s likely not financially viable to do a proper upgrade. Looking into stacking another 8 casks on top and getting a cask lifter is likely the way to go.
So if our storage limit is 16 casks and we have around 2 years of storage per cask, our production limit on any given vintage will be 8 casks. We’re currently running at 3 casks.
Another issue is wine bottle storage. We keep our wine bottled for as long as it’s been in a cask until we release it (e.g. 2 years on oak + 2 years in bottle) so it’s ready to drink immediately. Our cool room is nearing capacity now; however more efficient use of the space can be made.
More grapes means more fermentation bins. We do have space to accommodate these, but ideally borrowing or renting extras would be great, as they’re only used once a year.
3. Expand vineyard
At a rough estimate we have space to plant out maybe another 800 vines while keeping the environmental impact minimal – these would be placed on an old dirt road that’s currently being rehabilitated. On our current yields we’d expect another 2 casks from these vines, bringing up our very rough annual yield to a very approximate 7-8 casks, which works nicely with the cask stacking concept!
So beyond this, if we wanted to expand, we’d be looking at:
- Buying in fruit from neighbouring vineyards – not really something we want to do.
- Buying/leasing land in the nearby valley and planting out more vines – very expensive and labour-intensive.
- Renovating the winery to accommodate the increased yield from getting more fruit – again not really something we want to do.
Summary
Expanding from our current production limit of 3 casks a year to a final limit of 8 casks a year seems like a pretty realistic goal. It means next to zero environmental impact, a small financial impact offset by sales of the current production, and a minimal increase in labor – which really just means a bigger party at summer harvest and winter bottling!
So, keeping in mind that this is still very much a side hobby and even at 8 casks a year, it’s not going to be viable to live off unless we significantly raise the bottle price – not really what anyone wants to do!