We do like our wine-based businesses here on Iddictive. In January we profiled the tech-wine mashup of 94 Wines and we’ve previously written about starting your own wine label at the Algodon estate in Argentina.
And although we’re a little slow in giving it some coverage, Crushpad takes the idea of starting you own label even further – enabling new niche brands and providing a potential template for other manufacturing based businesses to follow.
Based in San Francisco and launched in 2004, Crushpad is a custom wine making facility that lets anyone become a winemaker and even (potentially) start their own wine business.
“Crushpad is a state-of-the-art winery where you are the wine maker. You choose your level of involvement and we do the rest.”
Would-be wine makers choose from a selection of grapes from vineyards in California and Bordeaux and then work with Crushpad (through their online winemaking resource) to plan everything from the type of barrel to the fermentation technique used.
When the grapes are ready to be harvested, customers can (if they want) visit the winery to get stuck into sorting, crushing and pressing. Once the wine has aged (8-24 months), customers get a chance to taste the wine and make blending decisions before finally working 
with the Crushpad design team to select bottle type and design a custom label.
A batch of 25 cases will cost anything from around $6,000 to $11,000 depending on the choices you make – which works out at about $19-36 a bottle.
Customers can create wine for their own personal enjoyment, as a fundraising effort (Twitter has launched their own range, Fledgling Wine, to help support the Room to Read charity) or for use in an existing business like a restaurant or club.
Where it really gets intersesting though is in the potential to create your own wine brand for sale.
Needless to say, Crushpad have this covered too. Crushpad Commerce does all the heavy lifting (compliance, ecommerce, shipping etc…) enabling customers to get out and promote their new-born labels. To date they have over 100 customers running their own commercial wine brands with many racking up impressive reviews.
If you’re into wines this is a great way to start your own label with minimal investment and plenty of professional support. But it’s also a cracking business model for other manufacturers to follow.
Site: www.crushpadwine.com
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