Sunbox Eleven wine: fruit of the Web

The South Florida owners of Sunbox Eleven produce their wines as part of a co-op run on the Internet.

A year ago, local chef David Gordon and Sunny E. Fraser, his partner in business and life, took a giant leap.

After running restaurants in South Miami and San Francisco, and working recently as a restaurant consultant, Gordon teamed up with Fraser to become winemakers, creating Sunbox Eleven Winery.

They didn't move to California or France or any of the world's many other winemaking regions. They didn't even buy a vineyard. They went online.

''I think a lot of people are shocked that we actually did it,'' said Fraser, a former banker and counselor.

SELLOUTS

So far, the couple has produced four wines carried by four local restaurants. They sold out 25 cases of zinfandel the month of its release and are considering increasing production from 300 cases to 400 or 500 if demand continues, Gordon said. Three more wines are scheduled for release in 2009 and 2010.

While the undertaking took a year from conception to bottle, making wine online is anything but a click away. Gordon, who graduated from Johnson and Wales University's culinary arts program and just this month was named executive chef at Apple, a new South Beach restaurant, has been traveling and cooking and tasting wines for years. He has tasted more than 10,000 wines, he said, including every petite sirah produced since 1968.

'Our phone would ring off the hook all the time with friends saying, `Hi, I'm in Aspen. What wine should I have?' or 'I'm barbecuing buffalo burgers. What wine should I serve?' '' Fraser said. ``So when [Gordon] suggested it, I said this makes sense because you already have a following.''

The couple, who sunk savings of about $100,000 into the venture, splits the duties. Gordon focuses on the production side.

Fraser, who spent much of her career running a private guardianship program before joining a bank to oversee its fiduciary accounts, handles business aspects.

CALIFORNIA CO-OP

After reading as much as they could find about winemaking and researching possibilities online, they discovered the clincher to their plan: a California wine cooperative.

As with other kinds of enterprises, the Internet has made life a whole lot easier for wine enthusiasts. Websites offer equipment, tips on blending, calculators to determine proper amounts of sulfites and yeast, even courses on becoming a winemaker, such as the prestigious University of California winemaking certificate that Gordon is completing through its extension program at UCDavis.

The co-op allows them to monitor their wine long distance, as well as provide the pair with services including complicated licensing, that would otherwise come at an exorbitant price.

''They could do everything, from legal to a marketing team to vineyards,'' Gordon explained. The initial fee to join the cooperative was $5,000, which does not include the price of the grapes or equipment. ``Then it gets into the six-figure range.''

The co-op, called Crushpad, also provided Fraser and Gordon with an introduction to their co-winemakers, who keep an eye on production at the California facility where the wines are made. In a nutshell, Gordon and Fraser decide what kind of wine they want to make, select the grapes and decide how they'll be mashed. Once the wine is in a barrel, sensors allow them to closely monitor sugar and alcohol levels daily during the critical fermentation stage, then check for bacteria and solids rising from the wine, Gordon explained. The co-winemakers also are on hand for work at the site. Every few months, samples arrive for the couple to taste to determine the wine's progress.

Small winemakers like Gordon and Fraser are plentiful. In 2004, the number of wineries in the U.S. producing less than 5,000 gallons of wine numbered 1,131 while those making 1.2 million gallons amounted to only 49.

`ODD CONCEPT'

But winemakers, who can sometimes be a persnickety lot, look at these newer arrangements warily.

''I guess you could do winemaking at a distance, but it's kind of an odd concept,'' Bill Nelson, president of WineAmerica, the National Association of American Wineries, said skeptically. ``Normally people who are doing this sort of thing get a wholesaler's license and then are having the wine made for them to their specifications. We're not sure the term winery is meant to cover people who don't actually make wine.''

Nelson argued that because so much of winemaking is tied to grape growing, wineries need to be located closer to their source.

''If it doesn't cost you very much to get in the business of having someone else produce the wine that you then put your label on, then why not? But you're not making an investment in the facility, and it's not hands-on,'' he said. ''You don't have a strong connection to the winemaking and a strong connection to the fruit growing,'' he said.

Historically people who collect grapes and assemble wines far from vineyards have been called ''negociants,'' he said, a French term for a wine merchant. Before winemakers had access to buyers, negociants were used widely in Burgundy, an area with many small producers who didn't grow enough grapes for their own production.

But because wine-making can be so capital-intensive, co-ops like Crushpad have enabled more small winemakers to jump into the business and expand the industry, said Jim Lapsley, an author and adjunct professor of viticulture and enology and chair of the department of science at UC Davis' extension program.

About 70 percent of the wine produced in the U.S. retails for less than $8 a bottle and has very large production run of a million cases or more. To compete at that level, he explained, is very intense. A co-op levels the playing field.

''It allows [winemakers] to have some economies of scale with production because they don't have to buy the grapes or buy the building,'' he explained. ``The advantage to someone is they don't have to put up all this cash to have something ongoing. The disadvantage is they're having to pay a higher rate, more for grapes, more for actual production, and a lot more for a whole bunch of things on the menu than if they own their own commercial winery.''

Typically, people who join co-ops either make wine for themselves and their friends or have small production runs like Sunbox Eleven as a way of introducing a brand, he said.

In addition, co-ops handle the complicated licensing required at state and federal levels to produce and sell wine.

More and more, Nelson said, ``people are trying things that were not done very much in the past. They may be good approaches, but they're not very traditional.''

Clearly, winemaking is becoming a growing interest. Between 1995 and 2005, the crop value of grapes in the United States increased from $2 billion to about $3.5 billion. Five years ago, UCDavis started offering online courses to certify winemakers. Today, the waiting time to enroll in upper level courses is a year and a half.

Long term, Gordon and Fraser hope to buy a vineyard and make their winery a local operation in California. They expect to break even on their initial $100,000 investment by fall 2009, Gordon said. To build their business, they're relying heavily on their network of friends and restaurant connections and even incorporated Fraser's old e-mail address (Sunbox11) into the name because so many people used her e-mail and it held sentimental value.

''The wine is about Sunny and about being one more than a perfect 10,'' Gordon said.

Gordon is the grandson of philanthropist Abraham Mailman and graduated from Ransom Everglades School before attending Harvard and the University of Florida, which Fraser also attended. He ran the restaurant Jada in South Miami from 1996 to 2000 before moving to California, where he learned about the grape-growing regions and then opened the restaurant SnoDrift in San Francisco.

Most of the marketing for Sunbox Eleven is done online. The winery offers frequent tastings where guests taste the wine paired with dishes prepared by Gordon.

Their website reads as much like a travel adventure log as it does a business venture, since they share the details of their saga to make the wine and find a vineyard.

One day they hope their big adventure ends with a California sun setting on their very own vineyard.