Imagine:
- An intimate tasting room setting that exquisitely showcases your brand.
- Handing your guests a glass of wine then taking them on a private tour of the high tech production facility where you craft your wines.
- Walking them through a superb tasting experience that profiles your best varieties.
- Selling cases of your artisan product onsite to those same enthusiastic guests who’ve been wowed by the whole experience and are now your loyal customers.
Envision that and you’ve just described Grand Cru Custom Crush in a nutshell.
Grand Cru Custom Crush, located in Windsor, CA, is a wine production cooperative founded by Robert Morris and Erin Brooks that provides 31 thousand feet of state-of–the-art production and hospitality space in a unique combination that’s creating success for clients and consumers alike.
Morris oversees the production arm of the company that provides cutting-edge, full service crush and winemaking operations to small lot winery producers who focus on a range of 20 to 100 tons of grape processing annually.
Grand Cru Custom Crush offers a full range of production equipment to clients, including: a crush pad and sorting system from Burgstahler Machine Works; a RotoVibe destemmer; 42 HI and 60HI bladder presses from Euro Machines; sixty six stainless steel tanks; four temperature and humidity controlled barrel rooms and the InnoVint winery management platform.
“Not only did we set out to provide the highest possible standards for our facility with the best possible software,” Morris attests, “but we also have outstanding staff here who are completely passionate about what they do.”
Beyond its stellar production capacity, Morris believes the key selling point of the Grand Cru facility is its ability to integrate winery operations with a unique hospitality experience that emphasizes the client’s wine brand.
“It’s imperative for wineries to be able to have a place to welcome guests, both consumers and trade,” reasons Brooks, who manages the hospitality end of the Grand Cru business. “The ability to have private tastings helps to underscore the relationship that you’re having with your guests … and ultimately, to reinforce your brand presence.”
Grand Cru Custom Crush offers six stunning and welcoming private tasting spaces, plus three conference rooms, for winery members to host their guests.
Each room is outfitted with a bar or table tasting area, chairs, tasteful stemware, air conditioning and roll up glass windows to provide an indoor or outdoor tasting experience. The rooms also contain smart monitors for multimedia presentations, as well as plentiful space for wine bottles and other collateral material to reinforce the winery brand image.
Importantly, proper permitting also allows for onsite sales of wine.
“In just a few keystrokes the room becomes (your) winery,” enthuses Morris. “Your clients walk in and it’s like they’re joining you in your own tasting room. It’s completely dynamic on how it can move to reflect one winery client to the next.”
Grand Cru Custom Crush winery members also have the option, through an elevated tasting program, to incorporate a TOCK software hotlink into their own websites that seamlessly invites and books guests for future tastings at the Grand Cru Custom Crush facility.
As an extra benefit, all vintners are invited to participate in two large community-based open houses per year that host between four and five hundred guests, providing huge additional exposure for individual wine brands.
“One can easily sell an additional $10,000 a year from those two events alone,” notes Brooks.
For more information about Grand Cru Custom Crush and facility tours, go to http://www.grandcrucustomcrush.com.
