"Old" is the New "New."

Pretty good with the lapses in blogging, right?  Maybe that means I'm super busy with other really important things.  Perhaps...

Whatever the case, I did in fact go visit the 'ma and pa' winery in southern Utah.  Yes I did.  The owners were nice enough to let me and a few amigo/as just camp in the vineyard, aka, the front yard.   
To make a long story short, I just don't think its in the cards for this particular property.  The asking price is a fair chunk of change.  Its nothing a few enthusiastic investors wouldn't be able to come up with, but in the end, if I'm going to round up that kind of dough, my vision for Utah wine is four hours north of this site. 
So I'm back to my original drawing board.  Only this time my drawing board is of a much smaller scale.
Earlier in the year as I was crunching all the numbers in order to put some sort of coherent package in front of imaginary potential investors, I realized that I was falling into the California winery debt trap.  On paper, asking for 3.5 million to develop 20 acres complete with a modest little production facility began to strike me as laughable.  Is it 2006?  Are we in Russian River? Doi. There's a reason so many wineries are folding right now.  Completely overextended, in over their heads in a saturated market, there's no way they can sell their booze with the inflated bottle prices they require to pay off their vines/land/shiny-ass new pumps and presses.  And now I'm using their model in Utah of all places, and in that scenario, what do I actually own? Nothing.  No way man, not my style.






So...We start small (thanks Nate).