The Covered Bridge Cellars Blog

We Now Have Another Twitter Account

I guess one Twitter account wasn't enough! So, we decided to create another one:

@CBCwinery2

This account will be for Casey to tweet from and eliminates the issue of having to list both of us as tweeting from our original account @CBCwinery. Our name was listed as Jeremy & Casey and in the description we stated that tweets were by both of us. Having two accounts seems like a better way to manage this tool.

We got the idea for this from the couple at Ken's Wine Guide. This husband and wife team use the following Twitter account setup:

@KensWineGuide  - Ken Hoggins

@KensWineGuide2  - Theresa Hoggins 

We had though about simply switching the account photo to designate who was tweeting, but that idea was pretty much a pain in the arse, so, we have opted for the dual account setup instead:

@CBCwinery  - Jeremy Cote

@CBCwinery2  - Casey Otis-Cote

We hope you follow us both! See you in the Twittersphere!

Jeremy

Wine Industry Oral History Transcripts

One of the stated values of Covered Bridge Cellars is Knowledge, described as follows:

Knowledge—We are committed to learning all that we can about our craft and to sharing this knowledge for the benefit of our customers.

Keeping that in mind, we are always looking for new and interesting sources for wine information. Recently, while cleaning up the wine related bookmarks in my favorites directory I came across this site:

http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/food_wine/wine.html

If you click through this link it brings you to the California Wine History section of the Regional Oral History Office housed at the Bankcroft Library of UC Berkeley. The reason I bookmarked this website is because it contains an incredible collection of primary source material on the California wine industry in the form of oral history transcripts.

These documents are freely downloadable in PDF format and provide an amazing look at the industry from the perspective of the people who have helped shape the direction of wine here in the US. The transcripts represent a veritable "Wine Industry Hall of Fame" list. You can read the interviews with Mondavi, Phelps, Gallo, Duckhorn, and many, many others. These are not simply four or five page summaries, but in depth, one hundred plus page interviews. Some of the older documents appear to be part of what is called The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series. Although the more recent interviews, the one with Merry Edwards which was completed in 2008, for example, do not show this affiliation.

Anyways, I hope you find these little hidden gems interesting and useful!

Jeremy

What is a Virtual Winery?

In our Twitter profile under the bio line for @CBCwinery  (That's our Twitter ID) we have written the following:

 

"Covered Bridge Cellars is a virtual winery making ridiculously small amounts of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay at Crushpad. Tweets by Casey and Jeremy."

 

A recent new follower on Twitter via a Direct Message (DM) asked us a simple question: What is a virtual winery?

 

Below is our less than 140 characters repsonse:

 

"VW's don't own vineyards or winemaking facilities. @crushpad makes our wines to our specs. Check this article out: http://bit.ly/1304c "

 

The link is to an article from winebusiness.com about the technical definitions of a virtual winery as it relates to various winery licenses. The numbers are from 2005, but that's not important. Here are the key takeaways:

 

"As of November 2005, the number of wineries in the United States has increased to 5,364, according to the latest Wine Business Monthly proprietary research. This figure includes 3,606 bonded grape wineries and 1,758 "virtual," or non-bonded, wineries. The data excludes mead or non-grape wineries.

 

The Wine Business Monthly count includes 1,758 virtual wineries. Virtual wineries are wineries that do not hold their own bond. A virtual winery has a physical location (which may be at another winery), produces at least one brand, and has its own management and winemaker although the winemaker can be a consultant or work for multiple wineries.

 

Wine Business Monthly includes virtual wineries in the final count for several reasons. In many cases, a virtual winery acts in much the same way a bonded winery would act, differing only in that the virtual winery has to use an outside bonded facility to physically make and bottle the wine. It is also not uncommon for a bonded winery to have begun operations as a virtual winery and then eventually grow large enough to invest in their own bonded facilities. By definition, all virtual wineries have complete control over decisions regarding the wine, from vine to bottle."

 

So from a legal standpoint a virtual winery is simply "non-bonded." The article goes on to state that these entities often migrate to bonded status at some point. And if you look at more recent industry figures, 2008 for instance, you will see that bonded wineries indeed represent a greater proportion of the total. This could also mean that fewer virtual wineries are being formed relative to bonded wineries.

 

From a business perspective, the virtual winery model is very compelling. It's less risky, as large capital outlays are not necessary since the winemaking is essentially outsourced. Variations on this theme would include winemakers utilizing some other bonded wineries facilities, but making the wine themselves. They might already have fruit sources available, but not enough production to justify building their own winery. This is very common in the industry and the level of involvement by virtual winery "owners" varies considerably.

 

Take the Crushpad model for instance. Someone like David Dain, the proprietor behind Dain Wines, takes vacation time from his day job to go to the Crushpad facility to make his wines each year, whereas for us, getting fully involved in the actual winemaking process over several weeks is a challenge. And yet still, other brands producing commercial product at Crushpad might not have any desire to deal with the "wine production" aspect of the business at all, as they are content to simply market and promote their wines. Their only involvement might simply be to say to their winemaker: "just make the best wine possible, thanks!"

 

So that's pretty much it in a nutshell. We like the virtual winery model because it allows us to produce a high-end commercial wine product without the need to come up with a few million bucks for land, buildings, and equipment. Since the vineyard management, winemaking, compliance, shipping, fulfillment and back office work is completed by Crushpad, we have plenty of time to build close ties with our customers, which is something we really like doing. It also allows gives us time to enjoy the wines we make with family and friends. In a future post I'll delve into some of the defining charateristics of the Crushpad model since it really is unique to the industry.

 

Jeremy 

Help Us Reach 1,000 Facebook Fans

We need your help!

Facebook's newly announced custom username and URL for pages is only available if you have over 1,000 fans of your page. We are not even close to that, at this point we only have 12 loyal fans. So to help get our numbers moving in the right direction we are announcing the official:

Covered Bridge Cellars Facebook Fan Book Giveaway

Here is how it works:

It's pretty simple really, become a fan of our Facebook page and we'll put your name in a drawing for a free copy of Dr Vino's book: Wine Politics. Once we reach 1,000 fans and are able to secure our vanity URL we'll announce the winner. That's it. 

Our Facebook page URL is the following:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Covered-Bridge-Cellars/20465367576

You can also use the tinyurl for our page:

http://tinyurl.com/nktsdy

We'll be announcing this giveaway on Twitter and FB too, so if you're not following us you can find us at:

@CBCwinery

Please tell your friends, family, associates and fellow wine lovers! RT's are greatly appreciated too. Help us get to 1,000 and secure our name! 

Thanks a ton!

Jeremy and Casey

   

Google Apps for Your Wine Company

 (This is an old--unfinished until now--post that never quite made it onto the blog, hopefully some of you will find it useful.)

This is a long, technical post. Ok, not that technical, but you get the picture. If you are thinking about using Google Apps for your winery, or, other business, read on.

First, what is Google Apps? From wikipedia:

"Google Apps is a service from Google for using custom domain names with several Google products. It features several Web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites, including: Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Docs, Page Creator, and Sites. The Standard Edition is free and offers the same amount of storage as regular GMail accounts. The Premier Edition, which offers 25 GB of e-mail storage, is 50 USD, or 40 EUR, per year, per account. The Education Edition, which is free, combines features from the Standard and Premier editions."

This entire package of "stuff" is also refered to Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD). Like the name implies, you will need to own your own domain name in order to sign-up. After sign-up, you will be able to send email using your you@yourwinery.com email address via the Gmail application, as well as access the other Google applications (Docs, Calendar, Pages, Talk, etc).
 
Once you are setup you can create up to 100 user accounts, each with 6GB of email storage. In the Google App environment everything can be shared with other users in your domain, or, with people outside your domain. For example, if you are working on a newsletter via Google Docs and you want your winemaker to put in some comments, they could do so by logging into their account and pulling up the document, inputting something about "aged in french oak...hints of cola, spice, earthiness, etc. They finish the process by hitting the save button. All changes would then be relfected in the shared document.
 
So let's look at the nuts and bolts of how you get started with GAFYD. Again, this is not the same as signing up for an iGoogle account, which also gives you access to these applications.
 
Step 1: You need to own your own domain name (yourwinery.com) to use GAFYD, and you also need to be able to change domain settings to get things working properly. DNS settings can be changed easily if your web hosting provider gives you this option--typically via a control panel of sorts for your account. Also, if you manage your domain through Godaddy or some other service you can update the settings there as well. Other than that, it really is a pretty straightforward process. All in, it took me about 30 minutes to get everything working, your results might vary depending on how fast your changes resolve. So once you can determine that you have access and can edit your MX, CNAME, and A setting entries for your domain (yourwinery.com) proceed to Step 2.

Step 2: Here we will sign up for a Google Apps account by going to www.google.com/a and selecting solutions for "small businesses and employees". On the next page you want to select "Get Started" under "Get email, productivity, and collaboration tools for business." On the next page select "Standard Edition." Also, while you are here you should definitely read Google's setup instructions and watch a few demos, especially if you don't know what you are doing, or, have an uneasy feeling that this might be a bad idea!
 
You should now be on a page asking for your domain name and whether you are signing up as an administrator, or, a user. You want to select the administrator button and click "Get Started." Enter your name and other information on this page and then click continue. You should now be at the username and password selection screen, enter your desired information and click the "I accept continue with setup" button. You should now be at the dashboard page of your administrator account. Proceed to Step 3.

Step 3: You are now at the Google Apps administrator panel, but in order use your domain with Google apps you must verify that the domain you entered is actually yours. There are two ways to verify--create a CNAME entry, or, upload an HTML file with a line of code Google generates for you into your web hosting account in the root directory. I have tried both methods--you will be verified immediately if you upload the HTML file since Google just goes to your website and looks to see if it's there. If you choose to go the CNAME route, Google will generate a random letter and number string which you will then use to create a new CNAME entry. Just follow Googles on screen instructions and you should be good to go. 

When I used the CNAME method it took about 20 minutes for verification to go through. It doesn't matter which method you choose and I found that the HTML route was easiest. Just open notepad, or, some other basic text editor, type <html>, paste the code that google generated for you underneath it, type </html> to close it, save it as whatever Google tells you to (googlehostedservices.html is what I got) and upload to your root directory where your website is hosted using FTP, or, your control panels upload file feature.
 
That's it, your verification status will be shown on the administrator dashboard page, just wait for it to change to "all services are running smoothly." Could take 10 to 15 minutes, or, maybe longer. Once verified go to Step 4.

Step 4: At this point you are ready to setup Gmail as your email system for your domain. This is the trickiest part of the process. You do this by changing the MX settings for your domain. These settings are likely setup to point to your web hosting company's email servers (most everyone gets one, or, more POP3 mail account when they open a web hosting account). What this MX change does is send all new mail addressed to you@yourwinery.com to Google's servers, thus, allowing you to use this address via Gmail. All mail sent to your address after you make this change will show up in your Gmail account--accessible via the administrator login and password you created in Step 2 from above. Again, to be clear, this is not you@gmail.com, we are talking about. You will be using a Gmail interface and sending and receiving mail as you@yourwinery.com after the MX change. Google also gives you the option to customize the look of Gmail by uploading an image of your company logo.

To make the MX change click the Mail icon on the Google Apps dashboard, then on the next page click the link next to Email Activation, then click change MX settings for instructions. (Note: Don't get confused here, your MX settings are changed via your domain management account, i.e. Godaddy, or, through your web hosting company, etc.) There is a drop down box on this page that has a list of hosting providers and their specific instructions for changing MX entries. If your service is listed select it and follow the directions from there.

The MX change is simple to make, you just delete what is entered currently--probably two entries--and put in the information for Googles mail servers. I had to make five entries, one each for Google's five different email servers, overall it took about 2 minutes. Make sure you enter the information to the letter or it will not work. After you have entered these and can see your changes, you will go back into the email dashboard in the administrator account that you created in Google Apps and then tell Google you made the changes by clicking the "I have completed these steps" button at the bottom of the page. It may take 15 to 20 minutes for things to process--you can check status on the dashboard page--but don't panic, as long as you entered everything exactly it will work. In some instances it could take 24 to 48 hours for things to propagate, but in the five times I have setup Google Apps, each time, it took around 20 - 30 minutes.
 
Once the changes are registered you should be able to login to your newly created Gmail account using your login and password you setup earlier. Please note that you will not be able to get new emails sent to you by accessing your old email account (perhaps you were using webmail via your hosting company login page), however, older emails should still be there. Double check things by sending an email to yourself at you@yourwinery.com. A word of caution, your email will be down while the MX changes take place, so you should undertsand that ahead of time. For our mail I was able to setup one catch all email account with our domain serivce provider while the changes were taking place. This was deleted after everything was verified to be wokring fine. Depending on your setup you might not have this option. 

That's it really, just follow the on screeen directions and you should be fine. Google also lets you assign sub-domains so that you can access all the apps via the following:

mail.yourdomain.com

docs.yourdomain.com

calendar.yourdomain.com

etc.

For example, click calendar.coveredbridgecellars.com to go to our Calendar login page. Maybe in another post I will go over how to set those up, it's pretty easy really, you just need to create new CNAME entries and then map to them via the Google Apps administrator panel. Google has easy to follow videos for setting all of this up.

There other tutorials on the web with graphics that will walk you through the steps needed to get GAFYD up and running if you need help with anything, just Google the acronym. And if you don't like the idea of tinkering around with this kind of stuff, or, if you're out of your element, then get someone to help you out.
 
Welcome to the cloud!

Jeremy
 

New Vine Logistics FAIL

The wine industry is reeling from the news that New Vine Logistics has gone belly up. This is really a disaster for any winery that was using the company's fulfillment and compliance services. The best account of what happened comes from Lew Perdue, editor of the blog Wine Industry Insight. The bottom line is that NVL was caught in a fatal cash burn scenario. The company's investors couldn't stomach any more red ink and refused to inject any more equity into the venture. Now, winery owners are left trying to figure out how to get their wine back and how they are going to ship it to customers in the future.

The ramifications of this collapse are broad. This is not good for the Direct-to-Consumer movement and it's obviously not good for the smaller wineries that need to outsource their wine storage, fulfillment, and compliance needs. We will have to wait and see the extent of the damage, but clearly there will be some producers whereby this event becomes the straw that breaks the camels back.

While this is obviously crappy news, at least it didn't happen during the holiday season, a part of the year where many wineries capture significant and much needed cash flow. If there is any positive news here, that would be it.

And just when you thought their couldn't be anymore "risks" associated with this industry, we are all reminded that suppliers need to be vetted and chosen carefully in order to avoid situations like this and that it's not just agricultural or weather related issues that need to be thought about from an operational and financial risk perspective.

As more details start to come to the surface it's comforting to know that the failure of a third-party logistics company is not something we have to worry about here at Covered Bridge Cellars. Crushpad has taken a vertically integrated approach to wine storage and order fulfillment. In 2007 the company updated winery customers on it's in-house logistics efforts:

Logistics - 2007

• Launched a logistics operation to improve shipping accuracy

• 15,000 square foot warehouse with 2 full-time logistics staff members

• Added address and compliance validation to reduce return shipments

• Increased options for shipment to include 1 and 2-Day Air Service

• Added software and weight validation resulting in less than .05% errors during our busiest month ever

• Initiated 3-Tier direct shipping project to increase distribution (starts Feb. 2008)

• Subsidized shipping one bottle nationwide to increase trial purchases

• Added shipment tracking numbers to order confirmation emails and order records

• Re-aligned shipping charges to better reflect per bottle costs

Crushpad's logistics warehouse is a state-of-art, temperature controlled facility, that has around eight full time employees dedicated to getting the wine out the door to customers. As with the winemaking, we have access to all the critical shipping and inventory data via a secure web-based interface. The entire operation is top-notch without a doubt. And Crushpad as a business is well capitalized, operationally sound, and cash flow positive--traits that are a tremendous competitive advantage for any company in the wine industry--particularly in this economic environment.

*UPDATE*

It appears the comments above about NVL not having an impact on our business were incorrect! Crushpad actual does use the company's services for shipping wine to three-tier states such as MA and NJ--although no wine is stored at NVL. We just got an email from Crushpad letting us and others know that shipping to MA and NJ is no longer an option. Of course, once a new vendor is chosen this option will be available again. This is part of the email that was sent:

"We can confirm that none of your inventory is at NVL. That is the good news.

The bad news is we are left with no legal shipping options for New Jersey, or Massachusetts. We are actively researching alternative solutions for these markets, and will update you as details are available."  

Shipping via three-tier is super expensive, something like $15 per bottle and it takes forever because the wine has to physically go to a distributor, then a retailer, then on to the consumer's address. No consumer is going to pay that, but we still wanted to keep it as an option.

When we purchase wine online we simply have it shipped to addresses in NH or CT, where direct sales are permitted. But not everyone has that luxury. This entire mess only highlights the idiocy behind the restricitve, anti-competitive, direct shipping laws in states like ours and elsewhere. If we could ship direct to every state legally, there would be no need for a company like NVL to offer a "three-tier" shipping solution.

As we get more information we'll update you as to what's going on. For now, it seems like we temporarily lost the ability to ship wine to MA and NJ via three-tier. What a bunch of BS.

Jeremy

Another Bottle Shot

This just arrived via email:

Jeremy

Digitized Bottle Shot

Here is a look at a bottle shot of our Path Stone label that our graphic designer at Crushpad just sent to us:

The label image is the real thing that has been photoshopped onto a digitized bottle image. We'll use this temporarily on the website until we can get some actual bottle shots. If you click it you'll see the super extra-large image!

Jeremy

The Cost of Doing Business

The latest issue of Entrepreneur magazine has an interesting chart on "The 10 states with the highest cost of doing business in 2007."

There are no real shockers here, but it does serve as a reminder that our home state of Massachusetts is not the most business friendly one out there. In a few months we will have to file our annual statement with the Secretary of State, which will cost us $500. This is simply an online form that you fill out in about a minute.

We also incur expenses in the state of California related to the winemaking and other activities, so we obviously have exposure to that geography as well.

With many states on the ropes financially, small business owners and other business entities will likely continue to see costs of engaging in commerce increase. Higher fees, taxes, and other charges will be used to close budget gaps, all the while eating into the bottom line of businesses--some of which will make it and others that will not.

For a detailed look at this data for all states check out the source document by clicking the link below:

Milken Institute

Jeremy

Wine Books We Own

We love wine books.  In fact, we love them so much that we even gave each other the same book for Christmas.  That's just silly.  Anyway, here is a tour of our wine library...

Wine Politics, by Tyler Colman, aka Dr. Vino
A Year of Wine, by Tyler Colman
From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine, by Jeff Cox
The Encyclopedia of Home Winemaking: Fermentation and Winemaking Methods, by Pierre Drapeau and Andre Vanasse
The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass, by Jamie Goode
North American Pinot Noir, by John Winthrop Haeger
Pacific Pinot Noir, by John Winthrop Haeger
The Art and Science of Wine, by James Halliday & Hugh Johnson
New Classic Winemakers of California, by Steve Heimoff
The Story of Wine, by Hugh Johnson
Winery Technology & Operations: A Handbook for Small Wineries, by Dr. Yair Margalit
Jancis Robinson's Wine Course, by Jancis Robinson
The World Atlas of Wine, 5th & 6th editions, by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson
The Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia, by Tom Stevenson
The California Directory of Fine Wineries, Second Edition

This is a good start, but we have many more texts to acquire to beef up our collection.  What are some of your must have wine books?  What should we add next?

Casey