In 2019, Margins Wine’s Megan Bell had just partnered with vineyard owner Larry Makjavich, sharing the work on his two acres in California and paying him for Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Pinot Noir grapes. For Bell, who, like many in her cohort, had staged in Europe, co-farming organic vines located “way back in the Santa Cruz Mountains on a thumpy mountain road” with a view of redwoods and ocean fog felt to her “like my dream.”
Six years later, Bell is giving up farming. “It’s been wonderful,”—a bargain, as Makjavich never raised his prices, and “I learned how to trust the style in which I make wine through my work with that site,” she says. Yet with a winery, tasting room, and sales to handle, the dream of the vigneron has faded. “It was a great idea in our twenties, when no one was married or had kids, and the future was a big, fun mystery. But, this year, I found myself asking, is pulling leaves right now the best use of my time? I have 10 other things on my calendar.”
As the wine market slumps and capital accumulation looks unachievable, winemakers like Bell are grappling with questions around farming. Some small producers have decided not to farm. While Justin Trabue, the founder of two-year-old Ward Four Wines, still pitches in with her grower’s harvest and other tasks, she says, “I don’t think I want to be a vigneron. It is a very hard job, and there’s so much volatility in having a vineyard. I appreciate being able to work with all these varieties and not necessarily have all that responsibility.”
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And that’s okay. “If farming long-term isn’t your desire, don’t feel pressured by many American wine lovers’ idolization of the European winegrower,” says Martha Stoumen, who leases a five-acre plot in Ukiah, California, while buying most grapes for Martha Stoumen Wines. Things are different in the United States, particularly in California, where winemaking and viticulture have long been siloed. “That very history has allowed me the opportunity to purchase such incredible fruit from multigenerational wine grape growers at a reasonable price.”
But farming is also a calling. “It’s an almost existential pain if you feel that way, and you don’t have land to tend,” says Napa winemaker and viticulturist Steve Matthiasson. For the farming curious, “it boils down to what you want to do with your life,” notes Florèz Wines’ James Jelks, who farms three acres in Santa Cruz. “If you think you want to do it, you should because you gotta find out. Otherwise it will always be a pipe dream.”
Half of U.S. wineries make less than 1,000 cases annually. Some, notes Virginia consultant Janine Aquino, are startups by people “who’ve been very successful in their careers, like finance or tech, and now they want a winery.” But that’s a rarified group. Most lack resources. SevenFifty Daily spoke to independent winemakers about their experiences with accessing and affording land, and how they navigated the many unique challenges of pursuing the dream of being an American vigneron.
Buying Your Own Land
When Plēb Urban Winery’s co-owner Chris Denesha arrived in Asheville, North Carolina, he got work at a winery that bought bulk wine from California and had a show vineyard, where they “drenched the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in chemicals, and it still looked like shit,” he says. The property also grew Catawba, which was “beautiful and had to be sprayed way less.”
That convinced Denesha that hybrids were right for North Carolina, so after farming them on others’ property, he and his wife Kelsey borrowed $5,000 from family for a down payment on an $80,000, 80-acre abandoned farm in 2017. Denesha had found it on NC Farmlink, one of many farm links nationally that match landowners with new farmers.
“We’ve slowly chipped away at it. You save heartache, sweat, and money just clearing roadways and invasives to figure out what makes sense,” he says. “Most of it is so steep we terraced five acres for grapes.”
This spring, they planted their first vines, Catawba. Denesha’s advice for would-be vignerons? “Be reserved in estimates of cost, yield, time, and quality. I wouldn’t draw numbers pie in the sky.” (In September, Plēb’s winery and wine stock was destroyed by Hurricane Helene; the vines survived. Supporters are fundraising for team members, who are now out of work.)
Iruai Wine’s Chad and Michelle Westbrook Hinds learned the hard way. “We were an urban winery in the Bay Area in 2019, purchasing grapes and seeking plantable, affordable land,” Chad Westbrook Hinds explains. With prices up to $75,000 an acre in Monterey County and over $200,000 in Sonoma at the time, the couple couldn’t hope to buy near San Francisco. So they moved to Michelle Westbrook Hinds’s hometown near the Oregon border, purchasing a $150,000 fixer-upper on three acres.
The mortgage on the house helped finance the land, and the couple quickly spent another $120,000 on 10 more acres, where they hoped to build a winery. Five years in, the dream has stalled. “Suddenly, a lot of fire insurance people won’t insure a rural area, so we’re not sure now it makes financial sense to put a winery there,” says Chad Westbrook Hinds. They have three acres of Trousseau and Savagnin. But given the costs—$50,000 for fencing and trellising alone—and the wait for a first harvest to start returning on their investment, they’ve run out of money to plant more. “We’re still largely purchasing grapes.”
There are “excellent resources” for financing out there, says Kurt Chambliss, the executive vice president of sales and marketing for TMC Financing, a certified development company that handles U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) 504 loans. Combined with a first lender, such as a bank, these SBA loans provide up to 90 percent of the purchase price for special purpose property like a vineyard, at a low, fixed interest rate. The Westbrook Hinds did get an SBA loan, but after $15,000 for an environmental survey and $25,000 for zoning changes that the county demanded, they ended up needing to recoup their losses, so they sunk the money instead into a tasting room an hour away in Oregon’s Rogue Valley.
A tasting room in a high-traffic AVA is a good way to generate revenue, says Aquino, especially if you have a license that allows you to sell wines from other producers. Still, Chad Westbrook Hinds regrets trying to grow so aggressively. “I felt a rush to accomplish some vision to translate to the consumer. Nobody cared as much as I did, and now our financial situation is more difficult.”
Leasing a Vineyard
John Grochau has been buying grapes in Oregon for his GC Wines for 24 years. “I’ve made attempts to buy a vineyard, but it’s too expensive. It’s not just the acquisition. It’s maintaining said acquisition for years to come so you can start yielding a profit,” he says.
Three years ago, when one of his growers decided to stop farming, Grochau started leasing his three-acre parcel. Even with hiring a vineyard management company, it’s cheaper than owning. Because he pays for the farming as it goes, rather than paying for the grapes after vintage, it does require liquidity. And some years, leasing is more expensive than buying grapes. “It depends on the yield, the management company, and us staying on top of them,” but Grochau believes it’s worth it. “I wanted that control.”
He’s not clamoring for more, though. He’s pickier than newer winemakers: “I wouldn’t lease an old vineyard. I did it for one year. With the low yields and challenges, it was a financial disaster.”
By those lights, Alejandro Fargosonini got lucky, but the numbers are different when you do the work yourself. As the owner, with girlfriend Andrea Spaziani, of Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini, Fargosonini started making wine in his Santa Cruz yard during the pandemic. “I got cheap, used equipment, but grapes were $4,000 a ton,” he says. Then he found Grenache at a tenth of that price—from 40-year-old, own-rooted, organic vines in the Central Valley.
After two years of selling Fargosonini his fruit, the farmer gave him a $5,000 yearly lease. With the help of one investor, a few zero-interest loans from friends, and a $19,000 value-added producer grant from the USDA, the couple went to live in an RV amid the vinerows. The arrangement allows Fargosonini, who grew up farming, the freedom to be unconventional. “We are rewilding. We have vines 10 feet tall growing up trees,” he says. Surrounded by Central Valley orchards, he vinifies neighbors’ stone fruit, “so we’re not putting all our eggs in one basket. If there’s a fire, and the grapes get smoky, we’re too small to get the crop insurance they have in Napa,” says Fargosonini. Despite the risks, his vigneron lifestyle is “more affordable than my life was before.” His advice to others? “Move to the middle of nowhere where there’s water and good soil.”
That’s not possible for everyone. Winemaker Caleb Leisure, who runs his namesake label, is committed to tending at least some of his grapes. “You have a limited tool belt as a natural winemaker, so farming is important,” he says. “In the cellar, I’m often relinquishing control, but I get to control the vineyard.”
Still, Leisure is raising a family in Sebastopol. He can’t commute hours weekly to co-farm a vineyard in the Sierra Foothills, like he did when he was younger. Nowadays, he leases three acres across two plots close to home, both planted to Pinot Noir. “It’s not my first choice. You’re always inheriting someone else’s vision if you’re leasing, and the challenges you’re working through you didn’t necessarily ask for,” says Leisure. “You also have to make the owner happy. My vineyards tend to look scruffier, and some want that ornamental vineyard.”
Alice Anderson’s regenerative organic practices fit right in on the 10 acres she farms with partner Topher de Felice for âmevive wines in the Santa Ynez Valley, 15 minutes from the winery. Her landlords raise organic and medicinal plants there, so the couple’s pollinator rows, compost piles, sheep, and chickens add value to the ecosystem.
“We’ve spent our own money improving somebody else’s land,” says Anderson, “but that’s part of our responsibility as stewards. Wine is a luxury beverage, so we should set the example for sustainable farming.” Now she’s leasing a second property nearby. Starting small and growing slowly, she’s building a business without loans or investors. “I’ve never paid myself,” she says. “I’m still working for others. But if, like me, you don’t come from money, finding a lease situation, farming yourself, living frugally, and not paying a management fee is an amazing way to start a brand.”
Ryan Stirm, the founder of Stirm Wine Co., spent his early years hustling between three leases in the Santa Cruz Mountains. “It was too much work for one person, but I would do it again. The experience I gained seeing things get fucked up because of what I did, then overcoming those challenges was invaluable.” Nine years in, he planted a vineyard on two leased acres next to his winery in Watsonville, California. “Owning may be a possibility in the future. It will cost a decent chunk of change. But leasing is not that expensive.” Indeed, in 2021, when Stirm planted, land was selling for up to $75,000 an acre on the Central Coast. Raw land leases for just $1,000 to $2,000, he says.
“You have a limited tool belt as a natural winemaker, so farming is important. In the cellar, I’m often relinquishing control, but I get to control the vineyard.” — Caleb Leisure, Caleb Leisure Wines
To finance the vineyard, Stirm worked with the nonprofit Action Opportunity Fund to get an SBA loan, a pandemic-era Economic Injury Development Loan, and another following crop loss in the 2020 fires. Winemakers hoping to receive USDA loans for beginning farmers or other government help, should take Stoumen’s experience as a lesson. “If you are a woman or minority especially, there are grants,” she says. “I should have organized my business as an agricultural business. Instead it’s a different IRS code. That blocked me from being eligible.”
Farming for Free, Crop Sharing, and Partnering with Nonprofits
There are other creative ways that winemakers access land. Both Jelks, of Florèz Wines, and Rosalind Reynolds, the owner and winemaker of Emme Wines, farm in Santa Cruz for wealthy landlords whose vines just need attention. Jelks’ parcel consists of “the patchy remains” of ’70s-era Chardonnay and some Gamay and Savagnin he planted.
“We’re not cranking out fruit like crazy, but we like each other,” says Jelks. “We have three acres of ultra-premium Santa Cruz Mountain terroir, and they let me plant weird things. I get the fruit at no cost. For property infrastructure, like end posts, irrigation, and gopher removal, they pay two-thirds and I pay one-third.” Still, lacking the pricey tools to make the farming easier, he says, “I waffle between ‘I’m excited’ and ‘I should stop doing this.’”
Reynolds’ landlords “come out and prune and learn a bit, and I give them some wine,” she says. For the owners, her work is invaluable. “An unfarmed vineyard is a huge mess.” For Reynolds, this half-acre is enough. “There are plenty more wealthy landlords with a hobby-sized vineyard wanting others to farm it, but that’s not realistic. I’d need five of those to procure a decent amount of fruit. It would be a waste of my time.”
Matthiasson might beg to differ. “We have all types of deals on 12 different vineyards,” he says. “Someone could pull the rug out any time, but we’re diversified. We’re fine if one goes away.” One deal Matthiasson likes is crop sharing. Though the term “sharecropping” has traumatic connotations from the history of racialist exploitation associated with it, the arrangement today between Matthiasson and his landowners is mutually advantageous.
Combsville’s Dead Fred Vineyard is an example. “The landlords hired a vineyard management company. The farming was pricier than the grape sales.” So Matthaisson took over the farming. “The lease payment is a crop share, which is normal in other types of agriculture.” He pays the owners 20 percent of his gross, so they make money rather than losing it, and Matthiasson has a safety net baked in.
“A crop share is a shared risk,” he says. “If they take you on, they might get nothing, but they aren’t paying for farming. If we go upside down, we don’t have to pay our lease. And we get to farm our own grapes. I’m extremely specific in the way I farm. There is no way to make Matthiasson wine if someone else grew the fruit. It’s about identity.”
Eli Silins’s farming is about identity, too. The owner of Camuna Cellars, Silins produces natural, kosher wines in Philadelphia. Two years ago, he started a “wild, synergistic partnership” with the Alliance Community Reboot, or ACRe, a nonprofit restoring land once farmed by The Alliance Colony, a 19th-century settlement of Russian Jewish refugees, located in Vineland, New Jersey. Silins manages a third of an acre of organic hybrid grapes on ACRe’s five-acre property. “There’s an understanding that I will do the work and do whatever I want with the fruit, but it’s being funded through the nonprofit,” Silins explains. “They’ll get the story, the collaboration, the tax breaks.”
It’s a step toward Silins’s specific dream. “What I fantasize about is having a group of like-minded individuals who can get together, like a kibbutz,” he says. That’s a different vision from the small, family estate of the vigneron to which others aspire. In the U.S., where finding affordable land is the top challenge for young farmers according to National Young Farmers Association, communal viticulture is one intriguing idea.
Accessing and affording land, the research shows, is even more challenging for young BIPOC farmers. Christopher Renfro has always ached for land. He sees it as a vehicle of Black self-empowerment. After a horticultural degree and a job tending vines at Filoli, a historic house in Woodside, California, he ended up in restaurants, where he learned about wine. He was working in wine service in 2019 when he discovered an abandoned vineyard at Alemany Farm, a nonprofit, urban farm in South San Francisco.
Today, Renfro operates the 280 Project, a paid internship program named for the freeway that borders the farm, where he trains teens from the neighboring housing project in viticulture. He is funded, in part, through sales of his 280 Project Wine. “I am still actively seeking land in Napa, Sonoma, wherever it is,” says Renfro. He dreams of finding a parcel where Black and Brown viticulturists can build generational wealth.
Renfro’s quest to heal a history of inequity in both wine and land ownership is a reminder that access to any workable arrangement where you can farm your own grapes is also a privilege. “I want our apprentices to have space so they can grow grapes, make wine, and grow food,” he says. “If the government can’t figure out how to get us out of the projects, I can.”
Dispatch
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Betsy Andrews is an award-winning journalist and poet. Her latest book is Crowded. Her writing can be found at betsyandrews.contently.com.
