One of the most famous Estonian venture capitalists and former Chief Engineer of Skype, Toivo Annus is a minor stakeholder in California-based winery Crushpad.

This is not a traditional winery for neat folks with “chateau and golden retriever”, this the place where tailor-made high-tech wine comes from. 

I wrote about Crushpad last year in Eesti Ekspress. The company provides a real hands-on approach to winemaking. It allows customers to buy their private-label quality wine, but also participate in the process of wine-making, starting from choosing the grapes and vindemiation (the operation of gathering grapes), ending with designing the labels. 

Yes, of course this is an amusement for rich people. The company claims of having over 2000 customers, among others doctors, attorneys, restaurant owners etc. All wine enthusiasts! They buy their wine from Crushpad often in very small quantities.

Sten Tamkivi, CEO of Skype Estonia has recently visited Crushpad and he wrote about this experience in his weblog. He kindly allowed me to share his observations on uniqueness of Crushpad with TigerPrises readers. 

Tamkivi reports Crushpad being “a high-end winery… where you are the winemaker.” And there is something really special about it. All the winemakers he has visited before mostly use grapes from their own field behind their chateau and turn it to just a few different kinds of wine. That means large quantities, blending standardized over generations, huge metal vats, endless cellars. Basically – a factory with some character, more or less, Tamkivi wrote.

Crushpad (or rather – their clients) make 900 different wines in one season. By tweaking and tuning every step in the process they use results in all of them being unique. Building a tailor-made wine with all of these variables, from the vineyard, grape variety and harvest to picking fermentation yeasts, blending or deciding to add wood chips for more solid color gives you extreme freedom.

Tamkivi also noticed that there is a high-tech angle of doing things differently at Crushpad. As a client, you can monitor every step of the process online. Knowing the harvest date for your grapes, you can tune in to one of the many webcams on Crushnet and zoom in to see how the grapes are cleaned from the greens by hand.

You could send text messages to the big monitor screen next to people working to say hi. In the active period, there is a graph in your mailbox every day, showing how we’re doing on temperature and brix (sugar content) and when someone dropped by to push down the grape cap in the vat:

And if you want to get really geeky you can drill down to this level of activity logs:

Wine-making is such a conservative industry by nature and to a large extent it should be. But Tamkivi is very happy to have seen Crushpad’s novel and fun approach to complement the traditional way.

Photos taken from Sten Tamkivi’s photoset on Crushpad in Flickr.