“If you want to make natural wine, your winery needs to be extra clean and you need to be double-y attentive.”
—Jack Sporer
What’s a ‘custom crush’? A custom crush facility is a plug-and-play, shared winery space utilized by small wine labels. You pay a fee, often based on the quantity of fruit you’re vinifying, in exchange for use of winemaking equipment and a helpful staff on hand to facilitate the winemaking process. Services range from picking and crushing grapes, to storing wine, to bottling and labeling finished wine. From hobbyists, to retirees, to passionate first-time winemakers, custom crush facilities offer anyone a chance to bottle their own, unique wines without the immense upfront costs. While it’s not exactly cheap to make wine at a custom crush, it’s certainly a lot more affordable than building a winery of your own. Some wineries open up their spaces to custom crush clients to help offset the costs of building and operating their facilities. As Jack Sporer, owner and operator of Magnolia Wine Services, explains, “In Sonoma, there’s not an appetite to create more wineries.” Sporer feels the town is already home to the maximum number of wineries it can accommodate and goes on to explain, “If you don’t have a winery, you have to do custom crush.” With this logic in mind, when Sporer and his uncle, Will Bucklin, needed a place to make their wine, establishing a custom crush facility in Sonoma felt like a no- brainer. Beyond needing winery space of his own, Sporer was becoming increasingly aware of a gap in the local market. While there were a number of custom crush facilities to choose from in the North Bay, few were focused on natural winemaking and the promotion of organic viticulture. Sporer and his natural winemaking peers in Sonoma needed a place to make wine and none of them could afford to break ground on a winery of their own. Understanding natural wine While conventional wine continues to dominate the narrative in the North Bay, the number of natural winemakers working here is on the rise. According to a 2023 story about natural wine in the Press Democrat , the movement is gaining steam thanks largely to millennials, who make up a sizeable portion of both producers and consumers of the product. As with custom crush, natural wine tends to lurk in the shadows of the larger North Bay wine scene. This may be in part because most natural winemakers do not own vineyard land, winemaking facilities or tasting rooms. Thus, they are tasked with getting creative: they lease vineyard land
or purchase organic fruit from organic vineyards around Northern California, they make their wine at custom crush facilities or other shared wineries and they rely on pop-up events and other imaginative sales channels to get their wines in front of customers. Though a universal definition may never be reached, most agree that natural wine is made with organic or biodynamically farmed fruit, fermented spontaneously with native yeast, free of additives and bottled with very little to no sulfur added. As one might explain it to the uninitiated, natural wine is to conventional wine what sourdough bread is to grocery store bread. The difference, largely, comes down to the yeast and organic base material. Fermentation is the process by
Pressing the grapes at Magnolia’s custom crush facility.
52 NorthBaybiz
April 2024
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