Grand Cru Custom Crush winery project in Sonoma County promises consumer-oriented experience

A new entrant in the custom-crush market is specifically addressing the challenging needs of boutique vintners to be more hands-on in production and have their own space to pour on the uniqueness of their wines for consumers.

Construction is set to get underway this month on the 31,000-square-foot Grand Cru Custom Crush winery at 1200 American Way in Windsor. It’ll be part of a growing cluster of luxury-tier wineries and, soon, a brewery in an industrial development off Conde Lane north of Shiloh Road. That’s where Dumol and Marcassin wineries operate and construction is progressing on a 50,000-square-foot Russian River Brewing production and hospitality facility.

Named after the official French wine classification for certain wines of good reputation, the owners of Grand Cru Custom Crush want vintners of small but proven brands who have outgrown existing custom wineries and want onsite hospitality facilities but don’t have the resources to build their own production facility, according to partner Todd Gottula.

He and his wife, Erin Brooks, have been making the 3,000-case-a-year Ernest Vineyards brand at Punchdown Cellars, a 16-year-old Santa Rosa custom winery serving up to 50 clients. The target vintner for the new venture makes 1,500–7,000 cases annually.

“They’re in that spot where they’ve developed a bit of a following and some degree of commercial success selling that quantity of wine to consumers,” Gottula said.

He said the venture conducted market research that purportedly points to the number of brands fitting that profile in California alone could be over 500, skewing toward producers of 1,200–1,800 cases a year. The partners are looking for just 10–12 of them to call the new facility home long term.

Grand Cru Custom Crush is set up as a cooperative, with alternating-proprietorship winery licenses under the facility’s license. If accepted after an initial interview, “member” vintners will sign consulting agreements with the facility. Members will provide their own winemakers and, likely, a cellar worker. The facility will have other cellar workers and interns available.

The concept started coming together two years ago, as Gottula and Brooks were looking to take Ernest to its own facility. They brought in Punchdown President Robert Morris to advise them on the move.

“We quickly arrived at the conclusion that the economics would never make sense to us,” Gottula said. “We then realized a lot of others had the same problem.”

Morris advised on the custom-winery project for several months then joined as a partner.

Grand Cru Custom Crush is permitted to crush up to 700 tons of grapes a year, which works out to production of about 35,000, 9-liter cases a year. The production goal the first year of operation is 12,000 cases’ worth then 25,000 in 2018. The target timeframe for the winery to receive grapes is August, the typical start of the bulk of the North Coast harvest.

To meet that timeframe, the pre-engineered steel building is being fabricated mostly offsite, to be erected after the concrete pad with its drains, electrical and piping are installed.

Equipment set to go into the facility includes a crushpad and grape-sorting system from Burgstahler Machine Works, RotoVibe grape cluster destemmer with internal berry sorting technology, 42- and 60-hectoliter bladder presses from Euro Machines, a basket press by Carlsen & Associates, 66 stainless-steel tanks from AAA-Metal Fabrication, and chilled and hot glycol temperature-control systems controlled via Tank-Net software.

Designed by Greg LeDoux & Associates after a historic building on the California Central Coast, Grand Cru Custom has rollup exterior glass doors to six private tasting rooms, each with another door into the production area, which will have four private barrel rooms.

Member vintners can reserve for the day the tasting spaces, kitted out with a bar, stools, shelving for displaying bottles and brand materials, and wine refrigerator.

The tasting rooms, three shared conference rooms, and operations office space are scheduled for completion in February 2018. The estimated cost of the Grand Cru Custom Crush project is about $9 million, including the land. Grand Cru Custom has inked a build-to-suit deal with the developer of the industrial park, Airport Business Center. R.A. Murphy Construction of Bodega is the general contractor for the building shell and tenant improvements.

Jeff Quackenbush (707-521-4256, jquackenbush@busjrnl.com) covers wine, construction and commercial real estate.