Crushpad in San Francisco: A Business Review

I've never been a big wine drinker, because wines generally speaking do not taste good to me. Red wine in particular tends to taste to me like cold medicine. The only wines I've ever enjoyed were "dessert" or sweet white wines, and call me a philistine or whatever but I generally have to add some sugar to any other wine to even make it halfway palatable.

Crushpad on Third Street in San Francisco is an establishment mostly geared towards the large "wine appreciator" set found here in the Bay Area, people who would sip a fine Chablis or Chardonnay and savor notes of almond and vanilla, rather than the notes of Robitussin and Bitter Nastiness that I usually get with every sip. While the main demographic here is wine hobbyists, I find it interesting as well, as a one-of-a-kind experimental lab where I can attempt to play mad scientist and actually create a wine that I enjoy for about $35 a go.

Thanks to our proximity to vineyards in Napa and Sonoma, Crushpad can have fresh grapes trucked in to do the actual crushing on site. I was disappointed to find out they don't have a bunch of barefoot French maidens on hand ... well, maybe not so disappointed, I mean who wants to pay for feet wine? Anyway, the crushing is done mechanically. The best time to go is in the later part of the year, right after the harvest season in September and October. You can go any time of year but during the spring and summer there's less of a selection to work from.

If you want to actually make barrels and start your own wine business, it's a fairly steep investment at $5700 to $10,900 per barrel. But you can get your own custom labels and re-sell your wine and all that. Just be prepared to wait about two years for everything to age properly. Probably a bigger draw will be the half-day classes and seminars, where you not only see how the wine is made from grape to bottle, but you participate in all the different parts of the process. The Community Crush events, where one neighborhood of San Francisco gets together and creates a wine together from which you buy one to three bottles (even voting on a name and label), are held sporadically in different neighborhoods and allow you to get in on the wine making process for the cost of only one to three bottles.

The wine blending sessions, held on the first Wednesday of every month, are the ones to attend if you just want to make a custom bottle for yourself by blending existing wines and flavors. This costs $35 per person and you leave with a bottle of your own concoction and plenty of knowledge.

Sadly I don't have the ten grand to go into the wine business by the barrel with Crushpad, but when I get the scratch together, look for my custom label Peeing Hobo at finer purveyors of spirits everywhere!

Crushpad
2573 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
# 415-864-4232
http://www.crushpadwine.com/