Top Tips you Must Know About Buying a French Vineyard
You’re sipping your favorite brand of French red wine while you have a fleeting thought if you could be the owner of a vineyard? If this sounds like you, and you’re confused about where to start looking or go for advice, you’re in the perfect place.
A French vineyard comes with quite some responsibilities. Even choosing the location with Vineyards in Provence, Lyonnais, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and 12 other of France’s wine regions may seem like a hassle for many. However, a dedicated wine lover adamant about expanding their love to produce wine is all it takes.
Your journey from sipping wine to growing and building your winery to potentially selling it will be benefited from the advice provided by us below.
Figure Out the Why
You need to find out the motivation initiating you to purchase a vineyard. You’re probably thinking ‘What is this article talking about, I want to buy a vineyard, and I’m here for advice, why such brainstorming?’.
Why you Should Do So
However trivial this may appear, you need to be clear about your intentions. Everything else will depend on the reason behind owning a vineyard. So, make a list of all the factors why you want to be a vineyard owner.
Examples of What Your ‘Why’ Could Possibly Be
You may just be an investor looking to expand your portfolio’s diversity. Or are looking for a change in your lifestyle. Maybe you are aiming to create the next supreme Chardonnay, Cabernet, or Pinot Noir.
Choose a Location
We are assuming you’re a wine lover. You may know that different grapes grow better in certain weather and types of soil. Therefore, once you have chosen the kind of grape you want to grow you can research the location where it thrives the most.
Also, you should pay attention to some other factors like accessibility for you and your family to reach the vineyard. You must pay frequent visits to monitor the vineyard closely even if you have hired staff to run it.
Decide The Size and Extent of your Involvement
Your love for wine may induce dreams and thoughts of huge flowing acres of vines. You have to switch back to reality because the size of your vineyard will determine its price. Your level of affordability will thus either make or break your vision.
You cannot be one of those investors who lose all or most of their money once they buy a vineyard but cannot take proper care of it. Running a vineyard is no joke, you need to acquire knowledge regarding it and be fully aware of what and how you’ll accomplish it.
Pick which Grapes you’ll Grow
You may think that it is quite easy to decide, and we should not have included it in our must-know tips, however, choosing a type of grape has more to it than the kind of wine you want to produce. Expenses come into play here as well. Your ideal grape type will entirely depend on the kind of soil and climate of the land where the vineyard will be situated.
There are often multiple varieties of a single type of grape that can produce different kinds of wine, which one you opt for will depend on the extent of your production. We recommend you to go for a hybrid variety if you have mass production in mind.
Leave Space for Potential Expansion
A successful business that grows at its rate. For a vineyard to be successful, you will need more vines and thus more soil to grow them.
You may already have planned for the future with your estimated profits and potentiality of investing further, or have plans of expanding, whichever it is, you should buy a plot that will provide you the option to expand in the future.
What Kinds of Lands Allow That?
Lands with vineyards nearby(You can invest in them when required)
Lands close to a wine trail(Usually there are vineyards available around wine trails)
Confirm if your Investment is Financially Feasible
Why you Should Do It
You have taken into account all factors and chosen a vineyard that’ll grow your preferred species of grape and consequently produce premium wine now what?
There is no point in coming to a final decision without ensuring that you will be able to afford all expenses. You can’t invest in a plot that will incur more losses than profits, or invest in a plot and not have sufficient money to produce wine from its harvests.
How you Should Do It
You should consult a professional banker and analyze all the possibilities that matters can go wrong and whether you have enough funds to recover from the damage.
The professional will also help you strategize how to run your business keeping the costs at a minimum while making quality wine. This will be your final step at determining the size of your land as well as how successful your wine production will be.
Physically Visit the Vineyard
You must have a good look around the vineyard you’re planning to buy. You should try to find out how to irrigate the lands and the quality of the soil. Besides, looking into the factor of possible future buyers interested in growing grapes, the land's production capacity, etc.
You should try to get as much information as you can about a plot of land before investing in it. So ask questions unapologetically once you’re there.
In Conclusion
If you are still only pondering upon the idea of buying a vineyard, as most wine connoisseurs do at some point, don’t worry that you have wasted time reading this article.
Time spent learning about such a big investment can not be a waste of time. You will carry at least some of the advice you came across today in your vineyard purchase journey.
