Vinfolio Blog

Like a lot of women, I didn’t start collecting wine until my husband and I started collecting together. We began assembling bottles and cases here and there before I got into the wine industry, but didn’t start truly investing until I had been working for a distributor here in California that just happened to have a lot of collectible wines. And like a lot of collectors, our tastes have changed over the years, but our cellar is in need of a bit of pruning, purging and possible restocking with new interests and finds. 

In August of 1996, the first weekend I moved here from Washington, DC, we attended the Russian River Valley Winegrowers Grapes to Glass program. Spending time in the vineyards with growers like Joe Rochioli and time in the cellar with winemakers like Merry Edwards, it was hard not to be persuaded by their passion for wine and to want to share that feeling with friends and family. We first started collecting wine as a way to have good wine available at home and to share that experience. We tended to buy wine from wineries we had visited or from friends in the industry, so we ended up with a lot of Russian River Pinot Noir. Later, on wine business and education trips to France, Italy and Australia, we started to add Rhones, then a little Brunello and Barbaresco, and a bottle or two of Hill of Grace. 

There are many reasons to collect wine, but I have to admit, we never really looked at it as an investment until I started working at Vinfolio. And I’ll also admit, I don’t know exactly what’s in our collection, how much we’ve got, how much we’ve spent or how much it’s all worth. But over the next several weeks, we’ll be cataloguing all of those bottles and making decisions on what to sell, what to drink and what to keep. I’ll be writing about the experience of going from amateur assembler of random wines, from the wineries we’ve visited and people we’ve met along the way in becoming collectors, to the painful decision of parting with prized possessions in order to put that cash into much needed home improvements.

Vinfolio's full-service storage service is currently supported solely by our 17,000 sq. ft. San Francisco facility (which is dedicated to customer storage).  But we're at the point where the San Francisco facility is nearing capacity so we're expanding our customer storage capacity by over 40% by beginning to store customer-owned wine in our Napa facility (located in American Canyon). 

As a reminder, we announced the opening of our 20,000 sq. ft. Napa warehouse in November 2008 (see press release).  Until now, the Napa location has housed our retail inventory and retail fulfillment operations.  As the leased space was sized initially to include room for growth, there is currently 7,000 sq. ft. of unused leased space ready to be occupied.  The Napa facility is occupied by other wine-related businesses and is currently climate-controlled to 58 degrees.  We are in the process of determining whether the landlord and other tenants are willing to lower the temperature a few degrees to 55 which is the temperature of our San Francisco warehouse.

From a customer point of view, there will be no other difference in services regardless of whether wine is stored in San Francisco or Napa.  Wine will continue to be able to be picked up or dropped off at either facility; delivery services have always been agnostic as to the source warehouse.