PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Vinovate Custom Wine Services is opening a new state-of-the-art facility in Dundee Hills dedicated to custom crush winemaking.
After breaking ground in late 2022, the facility plans to be up and running for the 2023 harvest.
“We’re going to produce some wines for really small, family-owned wineries that don’t really have an actual physical winery; they own vineyards, they may have tasting rooms, they need a space to make their wines in this beautiful custom crush facility that we’re building,” Vinovate Managing Partner and Winemaker Bryan Weil said.
Weil added, “building a winery of this scale, of this high-quality is very capital intensive. So, I think what you’ll see for the most part is smaller brands that make two to three thousand cases, may not have that ability to produce wines in this type of facility on their own estate.”
The facility is also dedicated to sustainability and will feature solar panels on the roof, rainwater collection and a regenerative organic 40-acre vineyard for its clients.
“We feel it’s a really great sustainability model because not only are we doing a couple small brands, we’re doing like six or eight small brands in the same facility because everybody needs a press, everybody needs a sorting line, they need tanks, they need chillers,” Weil said. “This single facility can produce wines for these eight clients that would’ve had to do that by themselves on their own estate.”
Weil says Oregon has been a leader in the sustainability space for winemaking.
“I’ve worked in a lot of different regions throughout the world – growing up in Oregon, I’m a little biased – but I think we really have put our mark on sustainability and really acted on that pretty heavily here in Oregon in the last 50-plus years of this commercial winegrowing and winemaking.”
He added, “to have this large of a facility with these small two-ton, three-ton tanks, it’s just not something we’ve really seen done a lot in Oregon yet, it’s been done very large-scale in Napa and Sonoma areas but not as much here so we wanted to bring some of that modeling up to Oregon so we can help out clients, not only for still wine, but also a big part of this will be sparkling wine.”
