Garage winery is revving up

Name: Frank Gregus and Maurice Hamilton.

Business: Pacific Breeze Winery, New Westminster.

Contact: www.pacificbreezewinery.com

Number of employees: Seven, plus more if we need extra help.

Time in business: Four years.

What is your business? We like to call ourselves a garage winery. We produce big, bold and powerful wines in our commercial warehouse in New Westminster. It's high-end, high value, unique, handcrafted wine we make in small lots.

How did you get started? Frank and I have a passion to make really good wine. We started as amateurs, making wine in our basements and we belonged to a local amateur wine club. The goal of the club members is to help others make better wine and everyone really helped us a lot. We got to the point where family and friends wanted to buy our wine, but we couldn't sell it -- and they wanted cases. We knew we liked making wine and the whole ambience of it, and we thought we could make it our business. We started with no money and a couple of second mortgages, and we went from there. We're small, but it's coming along very well.

How much wine do you make? We produce 3,000 cases a year, which is pretty small, but we have won more than 30 international medals, including three "best in class" honours for the first seven wines we released.

Where do you sell it? We sell it from our retail store at the warehouse as well as in local wine shops. As well, 45 restaurants in the Lower Mainland have it on their wine lists.

Where do you get your grapes? Most of our grapes come from California -- we use Bordeaux and Rhone Valley varieties. We don't own a vineyard, although we'd like to in the future.

What is most challenging about your business? Purchasing the grapes and then not being able to sell the wine we make from them for up to two years. I still work full time selling dental supplies to pay the bills, and Frank just recently moved to wine-making full time. We're getting there -- you've got to work carefully.

What do you like best about your business? Living out our dreams on a daily basis and sharing our passion with people who appreciate our wines.

Future plans? We'd like to expand production to 10,000 to 15,000 cases a year. We need to get bigger from a business perspective, but we still want to be small and making handcrafted wines. And we'd love to eventually own a land-based winery in the Okanagan.