Yahoo Finance The grape life: Uncorking the dream of owning a vineyard
But hungry caterpillars and foul weather loom
For sale: a four-bedroom, three-bathroom 16th-century manor house in Morra, a tiny town in Italy’s Umbria region.
Included in the purchase are a 1-acre vineyard, a 200-liter stainless-steel container for the wine, bottles, corker and labels. All this, plus an electric fence to discourage a grape-loving wild boar, is available for €1.75 million.
Nick Ferrand, 53 years old, and his Italian wife, Margherita Gardella, bought the property for €900,000 in 2004 to pursue their dream of owning a hobby vineyard.
Mr. Ferrand, who restores and sells luxury homes in Italy, left London and bought the vineyard as a way to “go back to nature,” he says. “There is nothing better than having a lovely Italian lunch and serving your own wine.”
The property also has a guesthouse available for lease. Now, they’re selling to potentially buy a larger vineyard operation and to expand their rental business.
In recent years, more businesspeople and former executives have been embracing the grape life, buying European hobby vineyards and bottling their own private-label brands.
Few pursue winemaking for profit; instead, many say they’re seeking an escape to nature while embracing the challenge of learning something new. The pursuit allows them to enjoy the fruits of their labor, but wild weather, hungry caterpillars and rookie mistakes can sour the experience.
Doug Hart, a 54-year-old retired advertising executive from the U.K., and his wife, Sally, bought a 4,305-square-foot house in southwestern France in 2011 to develop wine for personal use, which he says eliminates “the snobbery” that comes from producing regionally classified wine.
In a commercial operation, Mr. Hart explains, “you’re restricted [by the government] in how you can grow your vineyard, and you can’t apply your creativity.” About 2 acres are devoted to two grape varieties, which can produce up to 8,000 bottles annually. This year is their first harvest that will be used for wine production. Another roughly 10 acres are leased to another vineyard, upping potential wine output to 40,000 bottles a year.
The couple purchased the five-bedroom house, located in Lot-et-Garonne, in move-in condition. “We were relatively new to the notion of running a vineyard, and the last thing we wanted was having to redo a house as well,” says Mr. Hart of the property, which also has an all-weather tennis court, a heated pool and a helipad. They declined to disclose the purchase price.
Mr. Hart is scheduled to undergo spinal surgery, which will make it hard to run a vineyard. So over the summer, the couple decided to sell the house, which is their primary residence, and the land for €1.25 million. “I am a doer, not a watcher,” he says, adding he’d run a vineyard again without hesitation. “It’s a good lifestyle.”
When Mr. Hart and his wife moved to France from London, the locals teased them over their lack of expertise in winemaking. “They know it’s hard for city people moving into this environment because it is another form of farming,” Mr. Hart says. To learn the basics about managing a vineyard, he signed up for intensive courses on grape growing “to increase my knowledge and to sound convincing to some people who actually know what they are doing,” he adds.
The French government regulates wine production in commercial operations, but individuals are free to make wine for personal consumption.
Even as a leisure pursuit, winemaking requires a significant commitment. “If your hobby is having your own vineyard, you need to treat it as such and need to practice it,” says Mr. Ferrand, who owns the Italian vineyard. “Spend time there and begin to understand it and see what you can learn from it. In the end you’re basically drinking the fruits of your labor.”
Four years ago, caterpillars infested Mr. Ferrand’s vineyard. “It was like having a sick child,” he recalls. “You are there every day, brushing these caterpillars away and making sure they don’t eat the grapes.”
The vines have also attracted wild boar and deer and “anything else that can reach the grapes,” says Mr. Ferrand, which is why he installed an electric fence. Today he grows four grape varieties—Merlot, Canaiola, Trebbiano and Sangiovese—with the potential to produce as many as 400 bottles a year. The wine—white, red and rosé—is given to friends and family.
Simon Munro-Kerr, a 74-year-old former actor and retired property developer from the U.K., bought about 60 acres and 2,691 square feet of “absolute ruins” in Andalusia, Spain, for €170,000 in 2003. The restored and renovated home is now 5,597 square feet and operates as a small inn, with 12 bedrooms and eight bathrooms.
“The wine I make is nothing more than fermented grape juice,” says Mr. Munro-Kerr, who notes that he doesn’t use common additives such as sulfur and acid or sugar. “There are no chemicals added to it, so you can drink as much as you want and you never have a hangover the next morning.”
Last year he decided to sell, saying he wants to move to a similar wine region in Andalusia. “I would do it again but in a different place,” he says. “The great thing about making wine is that it’s never the same two years running.”
He says he loves making wine because the learning never stops. “It’s absorbing,” says Mr. Munro-Kerr. “It beats the hell out of watching television.”
Will Gissane, who owns a hobby vineyard in Britain, went to wine school and visited wineries to learn more about the production process. A trip from his home in England to North Carolina for his son’s wedding in 2005 first inspired his hobby. As people were getting ready for ceremony, he recalls, he filled the hours by visiting a vineyard nearby.
“I thought, ‘We could do that,’ ” says Mr. Gissane, who a year earlier had purchased for £780,000 a five-bedroom Georgian home in Herefordshire, England, where he now lives with his wife, Virginia, along with a black flatcoat retriever named Ember, three unnamed hens and two llamas, Hugo and Hamish.
Mr. Gissane, a 74-year-old retired executive of a biotech firm, says he had a “turf war” with his wife over how to allocate the home’s 1-acre lot. His wife wanted more space for plants and to let the animals to roam, and he wanted more space for his vines. In the end, he settled for a quarter of the lot to grow his hobby vineyard.
He ran into some serious challenges, mainly to do with the weather conditions of the U.K. compared with the sunnier climates of France and Italy. “I was just wishing to indulge a fantasy of mine that I would plant and own a vineyard and make some wine and with any luck it could be almost drinkable.”
And while he did indulge in his dream, not all of his wine has been drinkable. He planted the first vines in 2006 and opened the first bottle of his homegrown wine in 2009. “It was awful,” he says. “It was oxidized because I wasn’t sufficiently careful when making the wine to exclude air. Luckily he only produced about 24 bottles that year rather than the 700 he had intended because “the birds thought the grapes were rather tasty and consumed at least three-quarters of the crop.”
He produced no wine in 2012 because he didn’t like the taste of the grapes. “It was wet and cold and I am under no commercial pressure to produce anything,” says Mr. Gissane.
Despite his muted ambitions, Mr. Gissane has produced some winners. “I’ve had a few successes on the way, and I’ve won a prize or two in the Southwest Vineyard Association competition,” he says.
In November 2013, Mr. Gissane decided to sell his property and downsize. Health issues also played into the decision. The £1.1 million listing price includes the land, the 4,425-square-foot house, two barns and a stable, plus the winery with all the required equipment for production. Hugo and Hamash, the llamas, aren’t included.
[ £2.25million to park your car: London garages that cost more than a typical home ]
[ Top 12 countries where British expats say they are healthiest and wealthiest ]
