A great deal has happened in the last week. The syrah has come in. The mourvedre has come in. I've had a falling out with Sal the winemaker. I've reconciled with Sal the winemaker. Sal has informed me the grapes are mediocre. Sal has informed me the grapes might be pretty good.
My questions about Sal started when he sent me an invoice for picking up grapes and barrels as well as for some used barrel racks he sold me.
Some time back Sal had agreed to sell me the racks for $20 each, a good price. When it came time to finally get the racks in August the price had gone to $35. When I asked him about it he said:
I should have mentioned, I
bought 80 newer racks for $35 each. I still have enough of the older racks for
your needs. They're the same rack, just not as pretty. I'll have your barrels
on the racks for $20 each
OK, fair enough I guess. When I got an invoice it was not from GV Cellars but from Galvan Wine Services, an entity I'd never heard of (Sal's last name is Galvan). The invoice was generated from a typical cheap accounting program like QuickBooks or something, but what struck me was the Invoice number: 1001. It is common to being invoice sequences with 1001, just like checks in a new account, and I have a strong suspicion that there had not been 1,000 previous invoices cut by Galvan Wine Services. So I was the first. This struck me as strange, as if Sal was using the winery resources and then marking them up to me on the side with his shiny, new (and fictional?) wine services company?
I paid the invoice but informed Sal I wouldn't expend any more funds to anybody until I saw a contract from the winery for the crush services. He agreed to have it for me upon my scheduled visit, actually meant to be tomorrow. When I was first discussing the crush with him he mentioned all the contracts had to be in and signed by mid August to ensure a place (this is standard for crush contracts), so of course we're way behind. I didn't give it that much thought but as the months went on I was wondering what's going on.
I was getting antsy about the syrah and the main motivation behind my scheduled special guest star cameo up North was to look at the Syrah vineyard and pull the trigger on the picking. I knew the vines were shutting down, so I wanted to identify the ripest and just get those damn grapes in.
Last week Sal visited the vineyard (which is literally across the street from the winery) he decided the grapes were ripe and instructed Steve the vineyard owner to pick. So the syrah came in.
After the syrah was in Sal sent me this update:
Steve Worth brought in 5.78
tons and the cut off for the break down on custom crush pricing is at 6 tons so
I sent a couple of our pickers out with him to pick enough to get you over the
6 ton mark. This guarantees your CC price at $650/ton instead of $950
This seemed odd to me. Why not just charge me for 6 tons? I decided to give Sal a lecture on tier pricing, based on my experience writing software to do said tier pricing.
It went like this:
When something is price
tiered by volume any tier price is available to the
client as long as the minimum qty is used. What this means is even if I
brought in say, 4 or 5 tons, the pricing would be $650. However I would pay
for 6 tons. The way tier pricing is set up of course, paying for the smaller
qty at the higher rate is usually more economical (although not at, say, 5
tons in the GV example).
However when something comes in at .22 tons under a price tier it's
essentially irrelevant - just charging me for 6 tons would have been
standard practice.
OK end of accounting lecture ...
Big mistake.
I received back a scathing email, essentially impugning my grapes, myself and everything related to my wine venture. In addition Sal stressed that I could not store my wines after December that I was out of there, evicted, find somewhere else.
It was not a great thing to wake up to Monday morning. My initial reaction was outrage and naturally I composed many scathing emails in my head to really put him in his place. However if I've learned one thing over the years, it's not to do things in the heat of the moment that may impact you for a long time to come so I decided to calm down and think through our new situation. To complicate things Sal's vineyard manager was picking up the mourvedre grapes that very day.
In the midst of his vitriolic email Sal had stressed he would do a professional job on my grapes, but was his heart in it? Would he "forget" to cold soak the grapes? Would he "forget" them out in the sun? These are all thoughts that go through the mind of the stressed out wine entrepreneur.
I sent Sal a short response expressing my dismay at his feelings and assuring him I would move the barrels out in December. Since I needed a report on the weight of the grapes, as well as hopefully a lab panel I decided to wait a day and then maybe sent him another email asking for this data, hoping he'd cooled down. In the meantime I sent a query to Armando at Fess Parker. I had met with Armando originally to discuss crush services; we had both decided I was too small an operator for that but he had mentioned that they could perhaps help me
afterwards in terms of storage and bottling.
Armando seems to be a consummate pro; he had been sympathetic to my crazy wine venture, probably having seen it many times. As I reflect ion the difference between the organized, state-of-the-art Fess Parker operation and the frantic chaos up North it certainly brings up some questions in my mind as to where these barrels should ultimately be, Sal's eviction notice notwithstanding.
Armando emailed me back in the affirmative, so there was one
option. In the meantime I recounted the whole sad story of my falling out to my
girlfriend Adina and my
After spending Tuesday mulling it over I decided to call Sal directly and apologize. We had a long chat, during which Sal regained his original enthusiasm for the project, which seems to involve, as usual, a lot of self-advertising. At least he's back on it; clearly having an adversarial relationship with him would be a disaster.
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