We went to our first small wine growers meeting today. This is a meeting of growers in the Sebastopol/Santa Rosa area that grow grapes on 1-5 acres of land. As you might imagine this is a challenge to make money on small plots of land. The benefit is that the grapes get better care on small lots and thus are usually sold for a higher per ton price.

In this meeting we went over the different aspects of vineyard mangement and the associated costs. Basically you can most everything your self if you like or for a fully tractor ready site it will cost around $6k/acre for conventionally grown and $9K/acre for organically grown grapes. Believe it or not, most of the differences are with the weed and grass control.