Vino and brides.........
 

I'm heading out on a brand new career path. Later this year, I'm dumping my IT career of 12 years and going to run a business for my father-in-law. We're opening a winery.

The Belvoir Winery :: Home

You can read through the full history of the location on the website (just went live today). We own 170 acres of land. The building we are currently renovating is 110 years old. Three of the buildings on the site are registerd on the National Register of Historic Places. We already have advertising in local wedding magazines and have received a large amount of inquiries. The reception area inside the buildings is little more than studs and bare walls right now, which makes it difficult to get too many brides committed, but we'll have it looking much better by April.

Site will also be open for tours that cover the winemaking process and cover the history of the property. The site is also rumored to be haunted and while it has that look, I've personally never seen anything out there. Felt creeped out a couple of times, but that could have been anything.

I'll likely post periodic updates. It's a bit scary to jump into something so new, but my educational background is in business administration and accounting, so I'll be able to hold my own with a bit of hired help to assist. Early feedback from the community has been very positive, so we're excited to get started.

I didn't know you were gay.

;)

Good for you! You should flesh out the ghost story for the website and do a bit around Halloween to drum up business.

cool!

I thought you were buying an ice rink. Which is it, man!

if the wine is any good i might even buy some, despite you being MBBF!

It's an ice rink... made of wine.

There's plenty of room to install a synthetic ice rink on 170 acres. ;)

Yep. Plans are definitely in the works for paranormal tours. There's another site in the KC area that does it and they do extremely well. There's a big appetite for that kind of thing right now.

FYI: On Firefox I couldn't get the photo tour to load.

Thanks. I'll have the designer check it out.

Good luck.

I once had an old winemaker tell me that the way to make a small fortune is to start out with a large fortune and buy a winery. ;)

Yeah, we're lucky enough to have a well-known historic location that we're going to renovate that will provide a steady income through events. The wineries that do the best generally are the ones that don't have the wine as their primary income. It's fine for supplementary income, but not a big money maker.

Yeah, it looks like you have a diverse enough property to be able to do develop a few different areas. The buildings and grounds look great from the pictures, so conferences and receptions should be a reasonably easy sell.

Oh, and I applaud you for going a different direction in your career path. Never easy. Congrats. :)

Are you hiring? This lady may be looking for a job.

http://tinyurl.com/3bqkd9 (youtube)

hmm, i live like 7 minutes from the place.. as does kcchief. odd eh?

FOFC Happy Hour??????

Nice work, MBBF. Sounds like a cool idea and I hope things go well. Keep us posted!

I'm not drinking any Merlot!!

congrats and good luck!

So you married into money. Congrats!

A winery. What are you making Ice wine? It is freaking freezing here. I'm in St. Louis on business, and thought I'd chime in.

Oh and congrats on the new line of work. Best of Luck!

By the way, any thoughts into turning parts of it back into a hotel or bed and breakfast? With making it a wedding place, you might have some good tie ins with offering space to stay from out of town attendents.

DAMN! This is what happens when you're a fan boy for Sony?!

Seriously, grats and good luck, man.

I really like Liberty. My wife and I applied for teaching jobs there about 8 years ago. Didnt get the jobs. But we really liked it.

Good luck.

Already have designed it. Third floor will contain 6 smaller rooms and 1 large bridal suite. The idea is to have enough rooms so the entire bridal party will be able to stay at the winery overnight rather than drive after the reception, but it could easily be used for family too. We need to get the winery up and running to get some income. Once we get some money, we can do the work on that floor and finish the entire building.

Liberty is opening a second high school in the fall. But I don't think any teaching jobs are available. They were snapped up internally by existing Liberty teachers.

I would love to make some ice wine, but we don't have the right kinds of grapes planted currently to do that. You have to have a grape that ripens in November to do that.

Sounds similar to a degree to my local winery.

One of my best friends works in the vineyard and I let the owner do arrowhead hunting on my land.

Thanks for sharing. Pretty cool place.

You may wanna put some sort of direction/address/mapquest link on that site.. so you can get more potential traffic mbbf..

Obviously i know exactly where it is, but random surfers may not.

Yeah, someone suggested that before. I'm going to be adding some more information on directions and prices for room rentals this weekend. Of course, we don't want anyone showing up yet since we don't open for another 6 months. I may boldface the part of the front page that says Opening August 2010 just to get the point across. :)

If we could somehow mend this thread with the fragrance making thread, it would be awesome.

Congrats, MBBF. This sounds like an awesome career path.

:lol:

The timing on this had to be planned.

A possibility to help avoid that while still improving the geographical understanding of where you are might be a short but hard to miss text paragraph describing the location as "conveniently located X miles East of whatever and less than an hour's drive from Y&Z", etc.

Would make it tougher for premature lookie-loos but still make it more identifiable for potential customers.

Make sure you send me a few bottles...Purely for testing purposes you understand.

That place looks incredible - best of luck :D

They sure as hell don't have wineries like that in Austin, Texas!

I received a dose of good info yesterday. Met with a beer distribution representative yesterday. Found out that I can get tents, rolling bars, and cups for free. Two good things about that:

1. Before now, we were quoting rental prices on tents to brides. Some couldn't afford the site rental and the tent rental. Now, we can offer a basic tent at no cost and allow them to still have their wedding on our location. If brides want fancier tents, they can still rent them.

2. We're likely going to use the free tents to host an Octoberfest event every Friday night on the property during October. Should be a great way to get the community out to the site while making a good piece of money.

Careful about putting up a beer tent, a football game could break out.

I went to school in beverage marketing with an emphasis in wines. Good luck

Did you major in marketing the wines or drinking the wines????

Everytime I see this thread title, I can't help but think about "Boats and Hoes."

I missed this thread the first time around.

Congrats and good luck!

SI

I majored in Hospitality Management in college, with an emphasis in Beverage Marketing. So I actually received college credit for almost getting drunk. I also ended up becoming a Sommelier and was the teachers assistant for the Intro Wines class. My advisor in the program runs the LA County Wine Faire, so I've been able to mingle with some pretty important wine people over the years. It was great at the time, but not very useful in the real world IMO.

Not in Austin proper, but we do have two awesome ones here in little ole' Driftwood (pop. <300)!

The Mandola Estate Winery

Driftwood Vineyards

Thanks for posting those sites. The Driftwood site design is terrible, but I love their pavillion and deck areas. Would really love to build something like that at our winery. A big open air pavillion with a roof.

Went to the Missouri Grape and Wine Convention over the weekend. Learned a ton of stuff about how to optimize the marketing of the winery/event center. We also purchased 300 Chambourcin and 300 Vignole grape vines for planting in the spring.

Oh, and we had more wine in one 3 day weekend than most people should every be allowed to drink.

Things are starting to pick up. We just booked our third wedding. We currently have one wedding in September 2010, one in May 2011, and one in July 2011.

I'm currently talking with around 20 brides about having their weddings at our winery. One thing I've found is that their decision process goes much quicker if another bride is interested in their date. Two of our recent commitments occurred when another person expressed interest in the same date being considered by another bride.

I've found that it's best to be very honest with the brides and their family. They know exactly what they're looking for and you have to tell them up front if their plans may not work exactly as they'd like. We've had several brides come by and it just wasn't going to work out with them, but most of them commented that they'd be back to the winery once it opens just to enjoy the wine and historic nature of the property.

We've also managed to stir up a lot of civic pride mostly by word of mouth, newspaper articles in the local paper and Facebook. A lot of times, you wonder if it's working, but we've had an increasing amount of feedback from people that are excited that their town is going to have a winery that they can come visit, bring guests, and even get married or hold corporate functions. We've even been approached by the local symphony and local bands about holding concerts on the property.

One of the best ways we've got the word out is that my father-in-law is a family practice doctor who has patients pouring through his office doors every day. He can put up things in his office and it quickly spread the word about the opening along with events once we open. He's always been very good to his patients and I know they're very thankful that he's restoring a city landmark to something everyone can enjoy.

Good for you MMBF, it must be exciting!

I expect a Mizzou football rally this summer!

Congratulations, sounds like it's going well.

Yeah, I'd love to have some watch parties and I've had some preliminary chats with Tiger Club of KC. I hit it off big with one of the dads touring with his daughter/bride simply because I was wearing a Mizzou sweatshirt. Huge Tiger fan as I found out.

Sounds great, keep up the good work!

Have you looked into using Google to do spot media buys? I wonder how much it would cost to do a short run during some TLC wedding shows?

Wow, sounds great... I'm starting to get really interested in wine, to the point I've begun to collect enough bottles for a small wine cellar. Good luck, I'd be happy to read updates on the winery and your products.

National (which is Google's scope) would likely be wasted on a local/regional product.

Haven't done that.

I've been amazed at how much marketing focus is on Facebook now. You can do viral marketing for free in most cases and we're getting people adding our Facebook page every week. I'm actually going to add a Facebook page link to our website probably this week. It's an easy way to do quick info blasts to drum up interest in the business as long as you don't send out too many of them.

I forgot to mention, but I'm also designing wine labels right now. I think I'm going to go with a standard design with variations on each label (i.e. same picture of the main building with varying photoshopped designs). I'll probably toss up some examples here when I get done just to get a straw poll of what everyone thinks would work well. We're going to have 6 different production wines:

White semi-dry
Red semi-dry
White semi-sweet
Red semi-sweet
White sweet
Red sweet

I'll have to create a different label and name for each one. Feel free to toss up some name suggestions if you have one. They don't all have to be fancy names. We'll also have a red port or 'fortified' wine. We don't have a dry at this point because dry wines just don't sell well in Missouri. 60% of all of our wines sales will be either the white or red sweet (dessert) wine.

Yeah I was thinking local cable ads, but I don't know if Google can do that.

What grapes are you growing?

The problem for a lot of first time TV advertisers is that the cost of producing the spot exceeds the amount of money they intended to spend on running the spot, and they end up paying that little bit more on making a commercial that they then can't afford to run anywhere.

In a case like this (where image is an important part of the product) it's critical that the production be good quality. The local ads for Joe's Drug Store that look like they were shot with your uncle's handy cam aren't going to cut it. Sometimes you'll get "deals" from the cable company to produce the spot but I don't think I've ever seen one that wasn't an example a getting what you pay for.

With a property this size & scope I'd figure on a bare minimum of $4k to shoot the spot & that doesn't count the rights fee for any music, talent buyouts (you often pay for the right to use a voiceover for X weeks or months and then the "talent expires" so you're stuck writing another check or paying more up front for a longer buyout). And that's with me religiously avoiding the use of any unionized talent, if that's an issue in Missouri then you can add anywhere from 50% to 150% more to the cost right off the bat.

If you get past the cost of doing good production for a (relatively) small business then the spots themselves aren't all that expensive, especially in off-peak & worse times. With cable it becomes largely a matter of throwing enough weight at the target, but you have to remember that you're often reaching audiences of less than 1,000 people even in decent sized markets. Heck, I've seen smaller medium markets (say Knoxville up to the size of Nashville) where A25-54 audiences in prime cable were <100. At some point you can reach more people with a local/regional magazine ad or print or by sticking three flyers on telephone poles outside a corner bakery.

I think our primary work is going to be putting together some videos and photos of our location once the renovation is complete. Brides like to see things rather than have you describe it. It makes the sell a lot easier when they can see how beautiful your place is rather than hear you saying how beautiful it is.

--New York Muscat (white)
--Chambourcin (red)
--Cynthiana Norton (red & official state grape)
--Chardonel (white)

You'd know better than I.

I wonder if Mizzou could eventually work out wedding fashion shows or small trade shows to draw people in. Doing some sort of caterer fair might be a good way to get people onto the property.

We're considering holding a wine tasting festival next year and bring some of the wineries on this end of the state together. A similar deal in the area last week brought in over 1,000 people in a day.

We've also got every Friday in October scheduled for an Oktoberfest. Beer, wine and German food with certain portion of profit going to a different charity each week. Good way to get people out to see the place to support their favorite charity or just hang out with friends.

Good luck on the winery, MBBF.

If I ever make it back to KC, I'll be sure to stop through and sample some wine on the FOFC plan. :)

Didn't even think about that but it makes sense. I'd be pretty stoked if a winery moved into my town. Gives the town a more high class feel and probably raises overall property value.

When do we get to buy booze from it?

missed this thread the first time around, sounds totally awesome and I wish you the best of luck.

yeah - when does the booze go on sale?? hehe

Assuming you live in a state where wine can be shipped, it wouldn't be difficult. I'll set something up for anyone who wants some.


That's exactly the feedback we're getting. There's several small wineries in the KC area and just outside of town, but none of them have a 100+ year old building with historical importance and dining rooms with antique chandeliers for weddings/meetings. There's not many really nice places to hold events on this end of Kansas City.

Really happy with the progress right now. Our wedding gazebo is nearly assembled, which makes it a whole lot easier to sell brides on our location when I take them through it. Everything on the property is getting green (grass, trees, flowers, etc) which also helps quite a bit. I spend 4 1/2 hours on Saturday in the cab of a John Deere tractor. Mowed around 40 acres around the buildings. Looks great.

We also put together some preliminary ideas for landscaping. I think we're going to try to keep it simple and in line with the landscaping that you would have seen during the 1920s-1930s. We're going to put hedge rows along the sidewalk that will be trimmed into a 3 foot tall box. It allows us to frame the sidewalk and give it a nice curb appeal and also keeps people off the lawn areas. We'll also be putting in ornate stone flower pots along the path to allow some color while keeping maintenance to a minimum. It'll allow us to do some nice landscaping at a minimal price.

Met with a couple yesterday to book a Monday evening wedding. They were a family who was looking to do something on a shoestring budget and they were able to have their wedding at our place during the week for a fraction of the price they would have paid on the weekend. I was actually really excited for them. Felt great to give a young couple the opportunity to begin their marriage at a nice place while not breaking their budget.

I've started looking around and finding quite a few people who are financially secure and retired who are looking for a social outlet. I've talked to a few people like this and I think we're going to use some of them as volunteers. They all express excitement about the historical significance of the buildings and the opportunity to meet people through giving tours and wine tastings. I obviously like the idea because it provides a great promotional outlet for the winery (these people will tell their friends and spread the good word) while I'm also able to run the place with a couple less resources. It's a mutually beneficial situation.

I spoke with a lady who was around 55-60 about the opportunity yesterday. She just moved here from California a month ago. Lost her husband a year ago. Basically told her I'd like to have her do some historic tours and some wine tasting. She's pretty talkative and very friendly, which is a great fit. Told her if things go well that we may switch her over to a paying position at some point. She's also a member of the local Women's Auxiliary (VFW), so she could help me connect with other people who could be customers or volunteers.

I mentioned to her that kids have broken into the place while it was vacant because of the haunting rumors. I mentioned to her that I was a curious skeptic and had never had any tangible experiences on the property. She said she was also a skeptic........until she renovated her kitchen and a man started showing up in the kitchen. Her daughter first saw him and flipped out. The lady later saw his head and upper torso in the kitchen. Said a lot of 'interesting' stuff happened. She's no longer a skeptic.

Found another excellent marketing opportunity. The Greater KC Area Visitor and Convention group (visitkc.com) offers 225,000 visitor guides per year plus 3,000 convention organizer guides to people who run conventions or visit the city. Only costs $500 for a yearly membership. In addition to being listed as a tourist destination, they also have several groups a week that put in requests for a place to hold a one-day meeting. Our facility would be a great match for that option.

Also had an interesting news item yesterday that could substantially boost our traffic. Missouri has a maximum of 15 casino licenses in the state. The President Casino in STL is closing down. As a result, a license is up for bid. One of the bidders is proposing a new casino only a mile or so from our location. If it happens, it would be a huge boost for us. Fingers crossed.

One marketing tip I learned from my daughter's recent Disney wedding is the photographers. They are very important in a number of ways. Most obviously is that if they work at your winery, they will tell people about. They will use pictures in their marketing brochures, and you want to be in those.

More subtle is that different photographers are better at different things. For example, my daughter chose one photographer to take the outdoor ceremony pictures at the Boardwalk hotel at noon and another to take the dessert reception pictures during the EPCOT fireworks display at night. Why? Because the second photographer has the reputation as taking great fireworks pictures--and he lived up to that.

If you can, take the time to find out which photographers take great pictures at your winery and what time of day and where on the site. Encourage them to take shots beforehand and let you see them. You may have a need for these kind of photos, too.

Remember, after the wedding all the memories are in the pictures. You want people to be able to show great shots to their friends and relatives, so you want the best photographers to do the work--not necessarily the cheapest.

Check out the local photography Facebook pages. That's one way my daughter researched photographers.

We've actually already done this with a few photographers. Should be getting some back pretty soon.

Some updated pictures. View from the front near the fountain up the sidewalk to the building.......





View of the just completed wedding gazebo. It's hand carved white marble and really looks fantastic. We weatherproofed the metal roof material with paint that is used for protecting pick-up truck beds.



Looking in through the gazebo entrance.......

Wow...nice gazebo!!

I gave my two week notice at my current job. As of June 25th, I'll be unemployed for a couple of months while I work on the building and all the associated paperwork. Should be interesting to say the least.

We continue to get lots of interest in the property via e-mail. I really feel like this is going to work very well. Our only real hurdle to a lot of bookings is just getting the building renovated, which should be done by the end of August. Even the addition of drywall and renovated flooring (mid-July) should have a profound impact on potential event clients since it will start looking like a real building at that point. I also just received a Google Voice invite and will set up a phone number and message so we have phone access for potential customers.

Work was started yesterday on our new parking lot. Once they finish that, they plan to move on to repaving the existing roads on the property. Should really help the curb appeal to have those things complete. We'll also be adding a couple of sidewalks by the wedding gazebo to avoid any issues with trampled-down grass where the people/bridal party will walk between the gazebo and the fountain.

Congrats and good luck!!

Absolutely!!

Best of luck.:)

Great location. The gazebo and the fountain will make great photo spots. Does the fountain work (dumb question)? Also does it have spot lights that can have different color filters placed on it? Some brides don't look good in harsh light, others look best in orange light, I'm told.

Never a dumb question. :) The fountain does work, though we obviously aren't running it right now. Takes a good chunk of power to run it on a regular basis. No lights yet, but that will definitely be a consideration over the winter.

Couple of new developments this week. On Saturday, we're going to have our first engagement on the property. Guy is going to bring out his girlfriend as a grape growing tour with a meal in the gazebo to follow. What she doesn't know is that he's going to drop on a knee in the gazebo. Should be fun. Obviously a good opportunity for a wedding down the road as well. :)

I've also started working on setting up ghost tours/investigations on the property. There's a group that brings in the gear and charges people for a 5-6 hour investigation of the property. We get a portion of the fee they charge for use of the property. They want to do them weekly if possible, which would be nice. Extra revenue at no cost to us.

Does your place have a history of ghost sightings?

It does have a history behind it. I'm not sure how much is real and how much is fiction, but I'll likely know pretty quickly once I start working there on a daily basis. While we have quite a bit of interest in the wine and very good interest in the weddings, there's a TON of interest in the paranormal history of the place and what does and does not happen at the buildings.

As soon as we announce availability for these tours, they'll likely sell out in a week or two and we'll have to create a waiting list. People have literally been waiting for this opportunity for 15+ years. We've been getting steady requests for access by paranormal investigators for at least that long. Until now, the buildings haven't been safe enough to allow the public into them. Now, we'll have one building fully accessible. It's all a bit crazy, but it should draw even more interest to the winery which is great for us.

Silly...yet cool. And hey, like you said...extra revenue at no cost to you!

All work and no PS3 makes MBBF a dull boy...

Heeeeeeere's Mizzou!

:)

There's no one that wants paranormal activity in that place more than I do. If someone finds any sort of evidence, our reputation would explode and it would be huge for us. However, I refuse to make anything up. I'd call myself an interested skeptic. I really want to see or hear something that defies explanation, but it'll have to be something good before I believe it. We've got multiple security cameras inside and outside the building that are recording 24/7. If something happens there, we'll catch it on video whether it's paranormal or not.

I may or may not be moving my 2nd PS3 out there once we open up. Strictly for Singstar Karaoke of course. :)

What are some of the stories / rumors behind the place?

Great, there goes my inside contact to cheat on the government payments to my farm. :)

The pictures look awesome, I must say.

I know there's a buyer for everything, especially when it comes to weird shit, but you should probably do a pretty thorough evaluation on whether you want to pursue the paranormal activity side of it. Not sure where you're expecting your highest profit margin to come from, but I can't see many people wanting to get married in such a place though. Could very well just be me of course.

I'd figure just the opposite effect, if any.

Yeah probably a regional thing.

Apparitions of kids (place had a lot of orphans), footsteps, cold spots, some voices and knocking. There's some stories behind the kids that may or may not be true, but we do know that some orphans passed away of disease on the property and the northernmost building was a hospital for 40 years, so there's plenty of good reasons for the place to have paranormal activity.


Thanks. I can certainly pass on other contacts. :)

Yeah, it's just you. :D

Paranormal activity is a HUGE draw. If anyone ever got some significant evidence at our property, the business would go through the roof.

A good example that I'd give you is the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. They were holding ghost tours down there in that place, but it was mostly just stories. The Ghost Hunters program went down there to that hotel and got some pretty interesting video evidence. That little snippit made that hotel. Their bookings skyrocketed. They've got certain rooms with paranormal activity that you have to book 12 months in advance for weekend stays.

We have future plans for 7 rooms where people can stay. Those rooms will book solid for overnight stays on the weekend if evidence is documented. I know that I've experienced some odd feelings out there, but nothing that I can substantiate. That's why I'd prefer to remain an interested skeptic.

Just received an e-mail from the feds saying our 2009 wine labels have been approved. Some vivid colors on these labels with names that have meaning to the family.

Label Album | Facebook

I can't visit. I'm afraid of little girl ghosts.

You play too many video games. :D

In your facebook page in the box under the picture (is that the info box, I don't know), the text gets cut off after "A fantastic wedding locat".

You might want to clean that up a little? "Available for weddings" might be short enough to fit? Or something.

Also - you planning on repaving the stones on the walkway (to and from the fountain) at some point I presume?

I'll have to check that box at a lower resolution. I'm able to see all of the text. Thanks for the heads-up.

Cement work starts in two weeks. We won't be repaving all of it, but we'll knock out the spots that really need it and seal the other areas.