We went from a normal, wine loving couple to owning a vineyard in less than 6 months!
We are your average couple, having just entered our 40's and living in Florida. Wine was a something we enjoyed but not something that we had spent a lot of time studying. It was always a gamble if we would choose a wine we liked when picking out a bottle. We had traveled to Italy and learned about the wines of the Piedmont region, tasted our way around Santorini Greece, and to France where we discovered the Chateauneuf-du-Pape region, and even enjoyed a quick weekend in Buenos Aires where we found our love of Malbec. All were amazing, but we are not the type of tasters to let wine go to waste- so there is no doubt our learning decreased rapidly as our wine intake increased.
Then Came Covid
In March of 2020, we found ourselves in the same position as much of the rest of the world- confined to our home except for the occasional grocery (and wine) trips to the store. Also at this time a couple we knew saw the writing on the wall and escaped from the New York City covid crisis and came to Florida to wait it out. So we created our tiny 'covid circle' so we could enjoy dinners (and wine) together. As we got more creative with our dinner ideas, so did our wine choices. Finally, we decided that we should use our new-found free time to actually educate ourselves about wine.
This is a photo taken after our first attempt at a blind wine tasting. We took advantage of a great guide on Wine Folly for Italian wines and had each adult bring one Italian wine to the dinner in a brown paper bag. We left the wines in the bags and numbered each 1-5, then we used the Wine Folly guide to try and determine what type of wine it was just by taste. As you can see from the photo, Zane was not very successful! This tasting lead to more of the same for France, South America and Napa Valley. Slowly we could start to determine some of the major grape varieties, especially if we had them side by side in separate glasses.
If you would like to try a blind tasting at your house, we would recommend searching for a wine guide of that region and getting enough wine glasses that everyone can have several glasses to do side-by-side tasting.
As most of you know, when you are locked in your house trying to 'lower the covid curve' you can end up spending a lot of time searching the internet. My (Zane) searches started innocently enough looking at houses and properties in Italy, due to the depressed property values there. But as the days and months wore on, these searches became more and more focused on olive farms and vineyards. The only problem was, that even with the depressed prices, these are still very expensive in Italy and then you either have to move to Italy or find someone trustworthy to manage your farm.
As I ventured further down the rabbit hole of searching for vineyards, we did our South America blind wine tasting and we recalled all the amazing wine we had had on our trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina the previous year. We literally ate and drank for the entire three days we were there and loved every minute of it! So, I began looking at vineyards there and came across an interesting listing. It was a reasonably priced, small plot of land that had been producing high quality wine already for nearly 10 years, AND there was a farming team and wine making team already in place! All of the sudden an unrealistic dream started to seem like more of a real possibility.
On May 28th, I emailed the real estate agent (BBI Argentina) and began gathering information. What type of grapes were planted? How much did it produce? What are the farming costs? What are the wine making costs? Nadia and the seller were extremely patient with me as I gathered a mountain of data. I also began finding other US Citizens who owned vineyards within the same farming/winemaking cooperative and reached out to them to get their view of the management of their vineyards and the wine produced. They all provided valuable insight that helped us make our decision. Finally June 29th we put down a deposit on the property and closed the transaction on Aug 3rd to officially become vineyard owners! Then the real work began.....
How do we run a vineyard, build a wine brand, and sell that wine???
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