"Joe Sallustio" > wrote

These are not very common in the States, the only succesful one I
personally know of is Grape and Granary in Ohio and this is only a
small part of that operation. I'm from PA.

I realize you don't like beer but I think you may want to think though
how much business you would be throwing away not making it. You use
exactly the same equipment as winemakers for fermenting if you
'extract brew'. 'All grain' requires a bit more equipment but people
can make excellent beer with malt extract especially if you steep
some grain in the process. It's actually faster to make and bottle,
an ale is usually pretty good within a month of brew day. That is a
lot of potential repeat business being excluded. Since you already
know how to make wine you actually know how to make beer, the steps
and skills are not all that different. I'm reasonably sure ther
skills are directly transferable beacuaes I make both and learned from
books.

Back to wines, I stopped in several of the brew on premises in Ontario
and agree with everything Steve already mentioned.

I'm assuming you want good all year business so you are going to have
to find the kit suppliers you think will do well in your area for
starting out; they really are better now.

If you can afford a walk in cooler at some point you would be suprised
how long properly maintained pailed juice can stay viable; I just
bought 24 gallons of juice from Walkers in NY 3 weeks ago and none of
it came in under 1.08 S.G.

As to grapes, you only have two seasons for those; your normal one and
mid winter when grapes come available from Chile. They make a mess
and you will need a good crusher stemmer if you ever want anyone to
come back after the ordeal of hand crushing and stemming so some sort
of area to deal with that needs thought through if you really want to
do that. That said, wine from good grapes (and you have them up
there) speaks for itself, you just need to invest a few grand in a
good crusher stemmer and a few presses.

Hope that helps, if you want to taslk about beermaking feel free to
contact me directly. rec.crafts.brwing is an excellent Usenet group
for info as an FYI.

Thanks for the good information, Joe.

I'm coming to the conclusion that we won't be doing from-grape wines for a
while and before making the decision we should get to know our clientelle
(which involves *getting* some clientelle) and learn if they're interested
enough to justify the extra space, equipment and cost it would involve.
We'll see.

We don't quite have a walk-in cooler, but we have a bulding constructed of
cement blocks, very easy to maintain a constant temperature in any of the
rooms. A cooler room will probably happen in October.

We considered doing the u-Brew (beer) with the wine, and it's still an
option for the future, but even a small operation would require an
additional $30,000 for equipment. The combo (wine and beer) operations I
visited all seemed to have a fragrance of fermenting hops and to be honest
this turned me off the whole idea (I'm not a beer lover). Perhaps it was a
cleanliness issue, but it was not pleasant.

Happy New Year, and Cheers
<a clink of my wine glass to your beer mug>