Late last year, he left behind a high-stress office in Manhattan’s bustling garment district. He thought the sale would cover the deal’s cost, but he still had to borrow $500,000 from Sunflower Bank. He sold his 2,100-square-foot home in Fair Haven, N.J., where the median home price is $435,771, to finance the new business. He bought the winery for an undisclosed price and leases 10 acres of abbey property along U.S. His wine knowledge was confined to picking a vintage to complement a meal, but he believed he had the skills to make his plan work. Oddo came to visit, fell in love with the area and began writing a business plan. But the clergymen are gone, their ranks thinned by retirement and death, and the abbey and its property are up for sale.
The Benedictine Society opened the winery five years ago to provide cash to maintain the monastery, once home to 250 of the order’s monks. “I was looking for something completely different,” he said.Ī friend tipped him off to a winery for sale in Cañon City. But a B&B would have required Oddo to be an accountant in the off-season, a sacrifice he wasn’t willing to make. They considered bed-and- breakfasts in New Mexico and Colorado, two states they had never visited but where friends lived. When they decided to make a break with the past, they looked West. Oddo said he now makes less than he did as a partner at a mid-sized accounting office.īut he and his wife, Diane, are willing to pay that price. Oddo said he expects Holy Cross to produce about 12,000 cases this year. “You can’t say, ‘I did 5,000 cases this year and I will sell 50,000 cases in a few years.’ There tends to be a threshold that is difficult to sell beyond.” “It can be a very profitable business, but it is a limited business – it doesn’t scale up well,” said James Lapsley, adjunct professor with the department of viticulture and enology at the University of California at Davis. Wine presents opportunities for profit, if not riches. They start as home winemakers, and then it becomes a real business.” “Sometimes it is a lifestyle thing,” said Cyril Penn, editor of Wine Business Monthly, an industry trade magazine based in Sonoma, Calif. They have been successful in building a career and making money, have some affinity for wine and want to try something different. Many entrepreneurs who enter the wine business are like Oddo. Along the way, he has had to borrow $500,000, deal with retailers suspicious of the young winery’s product and combat his own tendency to micromanage.
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