Hindsight and rearview mirrors

There’s the old saying that hindsight is 20/20. There’s also the statement that objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear. Looking back at 20 years of professional wine making, I can see both these statements at the same time.

Steve’s very fond of saying that he started the winery on a shoelace and has most of it left. We started with a very small winery: a hand corker, small Bon Vino filter, single bottle filler wand, and some stainless 55 gallon barrels that we soon realized why the other winery was happy to give them to us. We got our fruit from vineyards (yes, we did start doing some grapes) that were local, after their regular customers got all they wanted. We had people offer us pears from the trees in the old farm yards in exchange for a bottle of wine, and we picked wild blackberries and elderberries anywhere we could. We reused bottles, after tracking down the information that yes you could and we printed our own labels; and yes, they looked like it.

It was 2016, 12 years after we started before we got our first “big” pieces of equipment. The first ones were Bessie and Bertha: a four bottle gravity fill bottle filler and a 20×20 filter system. We’d continue using the hand corker for another 5 years, and it would be a couple more years after that before we got the electric labeler, even though we’d been having them professionally printed since 2014. We have moved up from the those old stainless barrels, even if we’re still doing 55 gallon drums. We use a lot of various sized food grade plastic barrels that range in size from 25 up to 500, and can put about 8000 gallons in our space now if we had to.

This last week, we were doing some very small run batches of wine and had the old Bon Vino out for them. It just made sense, because they were less than 20 gallons per barrel. Bertha can do about 350 gallons an hour at her best, and really doesn’t like you wasting her time for small amounts. We drug out the old bottling bucket as well, no need to bother Bessie when her storage tank is about 10 gallons and, like I said, we were doing about 10 gallons on some of these. We did fire up the pneumatic corker: it doesn’t care if you’re doing one bottle or 10,000. He’s cool like that.

The whole thing made me remember conversations with some others looking at getting into the Texas wine business through the years. So many times we told them that you don’t have to start large to succeed, you just have to be willing to put in the time. There will always be someone who’s bigger than you, but if you talk to them, most started at a modest to small size and worked their rears off to get where they are.

Over the last month, we’ve made some major behind the scenes changes to the winery. We’ve changed from a sole proprietor to an LLC. TJ, aka “The Boy”, is working more to step into the role of leadership and has shown that he does have Steve’s natural talent for wine making. I guess it doesn’t hurt that he’s grown up in this building. It’s humbling to realize that what we started with 20 years ago: a great idea, a passion for wine, a small building, and the bare necessities of equipment, can still be found on the property. The Boy that learned from an early age how to run a hand cranked crusher, and a bottling wand, now knows how to take apart the 1/2 horse motors on the big equipment and do minor repairs on them. The passion runs a bit quieter in him than Steve, but it’s still there, and they both still love working together.

So, here’s to another several years out in the woods. And if you’re thinking about turning a passion into a career, here’s my only pieces of advice: make sure you’re willing to fail as well as succeed. Remember to get back up if you do fail and start again. Start simple, and look back once in a while so you see how far you’ve come. It’ll amaze you!