Pouring out sound advice for new proprietors

This could have worked as simply a podcast, but with no confidence yet that readers will take the time to click the link, it made more sense to type out Rob Deford’s answer to the advice he’d give anyone going into the wine biz.

“A lot of people come in and talk to me before they start a winery,” the owner of Boordy Vineyards said a few days ago, “but I can see when they come through the door that they already have their mind made up and very little I say is going to change anything. I mean on the wine side, I would say, don’t do anything unless you’ve got the perfect site, and the vineyards come first. And then after that, I would say tread lightly in your community.”

Asked what he meant by that, Deford said: “Well, wineries are on that leading edge of agriculture going direct to consumers, and as such we represent the new ag, the so-called value-added ag where you are taking a product, a raw material and converting it on your farm and then selling it direct. And that’s a buzz word, value-added agriculture. It’s a known term in the federal government, there are actually grants directed toward that and so forth. But also on the community level it represents both a sort of local hero quality but also possibly a huge nuisance factor as you start to hold weddings and helicopter rides and, you know, loud concerts where there’s a half-hour traffic jam on your little country road. People being to look at wineries differently; in fact, I was really surprised on one of my trips to California to hear that in Napa Valley you can’t hold an event without a permit.

“I thought, woah, we take it for granted here that seven days a week that, if I want to, I can hold an event here. I don’t have to ask permission from anybody. I suddenly thought, if you get enough of us together and the guy down the road figures out that with a couple of well-placed ads he can have 2,000 people on his farm, and he thinks that’s just the greatest thing in the world, then the neighbors are going to go bonkers. So treading lightly means that remember you are part of the community and can be a huge contributor to the community. But from the very conception of your business plan, when you enter that first bureaucratic office and want to announce your intentions to the zoning people or the building code people or the community association, tread lightly and be very sensitive to the concerns of the community. Because that’s where I see most of the pain occurring is when someone hasn’t fully done their homework and understands human nature well enough that you often aren’t God’s gift to the neighborhood the way you might think you are but you really are viewed as perhaps a threat.

"And so there are many, many positive things to tell, and that’s the story we have to emphasize and the story we have to live out is the positive side. Land preservation . . . sustainable agriculture. Local food. Good wine. Family-style responsible entertainment. There are many, many good stories to tell and we have to make sure to define ourselves in a positive light going forward. That would be my little bit.”