Wine Making Tidbits

• A single grape cluster (~80 grapes) equals 1 glass or so of wine.
• Four Clusters equals 1 bottle of wine.
• Forty Clusters is approximately one vines worth.
• That means one vine produces about 10 bottles of wine.
• There are about 1200 clusters (30 vines) in 1 barrel of wine (60 gallons)
• Sixty gallons makes 25 cases of wine.
• One acre of vineyard is around 400 vines which produces 5 tons of wine.
• 5 tons of wine is around 332 cases.
• 332 cases is 3,984 bottles of wine.
• At $30 per bottle, that equals $119,520.00
• An acre of vineyard in Napa costs around $100,000.00.
• A ton of grapes in 2002 cost $2,838.72, or around $15,000 for an acres worth of grapes.
• So if you own 10 acres in Napa, producing 50 tons of grapes, you either sell your grapes for $150,000.00 or, make it into wine and sell your grape juice at $30 per bottle and gross around $1.3 million.

Caveat: I’ve grossly ignored the cost of wine production and am in no way implying that wine economics is this simple or lucrative. Growing grapes and making wine is a lot of hard work and requires serious financial planning and marketing. My hat goes off to those who are making it happen!Sources: http://www.800wine.com/winefacts.cfm, http://www.bergmanvineyards.com/bergman1.html, http://www.winebusiness.com/Html/MonthlyArticle.cfm?dataId=16074