The closest most winelovers will get to owning a vineyard is at the point of purchase of a bottle of wine. That is insufficient for some wine drinkers of means; so they go out and buy a vineyard and get the relevant assistance for wine production. Then there are the in-betweeners: they have the passion but not the means/interest to pursue full-time ownership. For this segment of the wine-loving community, renting a (portion of a) vineyard fits the bill. And there are a number of solutions set up to meet this need but they tend to be very specific.
Not so Grapekeeper, the multi-faceted, luxury, sustainably oriented, rent-a-vine program that is the brainchild of Portuguese Environmental Engineer and Entrepreuner (and Winelover) Ana Monforte Weijters. I will be describing the fundamentals of this program over two posts beginning herein with its conception and initial development. I have become familiar with Grapekeeper through my travels with Ana in Portugal as part of the #Winelover Community, through joint work on #Winelover Committee projects, as a subject of two InstagramLive interviews on Regenerative Agriculture, through two Grapekeeper-specific interviews, through many Messenger and email exchanges, and through secondary research.
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| Ana Monforte Weijters (Courtesy Grapekeeper) |
Ana describes herself as Founder, Chief of all Troubles, and Managing Director of Grapekeeper. She grew up in the Portuguese countryside in a small town called Maia. She made wine with her grandfather and remembers these as exhilarating times filled with smells, people, and memories (especially around harvest).
Ana left Maia and continued her studies in Porto where she graduated with a degree in Environmental Engineering. Her work experience includes stints in Antwerp and Africa where she consulted on waste management, sustainability, biodiversity, and climate-effects mitigation.
She was resident in the Netherlands between 2007 and 2010 and again between 2015 and 2021, the early part of the latter period being co-incident with a burgeoning interest in wine. In this timeframe she studied the WSET approach and begun visiting vineyards. As her vineyard visits grew in number, Ana began to think of winemakers as "keepers of the land." She postulated that quality differences between wines reflected the differences in the way that winemakers managed the land.
Ana's first harvest was in Mosel in 2017 after which she went on to Piedmont. After a week of touring and talking to farmers, the first wisps of the Grapekeeper concept began to waft through her consciousness. That initial conception was a melding of:
- Fantastic producers with vision, personality, and terroir
- Sustainable farming of specific plots
- Consumers who had the ability to shift things because of their purchasing power (Ana sees these as people who are open to/practice sustainable, conscious, holistic buying and consumption and who perceive "that a luxury must be luxurious throughout all its value chain and touch, in a positive way, everyone and everything involved in its making.").
With this framework in mind, Ana began the legwork of developing an understanding of the market, market players, and existing business models. Once she had fleshed out her knowledge base, she launched an initial offering in 2018 -- with a business partner -- centered on vineyards in Germany and Italy. This was already an innovative offering in that (i) it had sustainability at its core and (ii) it offered potential customers a choice of vineyards/wine styles/wine types derived from two countries. They "did a lot of tweaking" of the offering and business model in that initial year.
The partnership did not pan out (Ana prefers not to dwell on the why nots) so she re-launched as the sole owner in 2019. The business was given a boost by her June entry into a Netherlands business competition sponsored by Quote Magazine. The competition, and the associated magazine and media coverage, “sped up the process" by providing her (i) the time and space within which to examine the business and develop a sound implementation plan and (ii) the opportunity to meet potential producer partners (Niepoort, in the Douro, for example).
By the end of 1919 she had developed a robust business model. had established a set of strict criteria for Program producers, determined an initial customer-acquisition strategy, and defined her role within the model. And then the pandemic hit, slowing everything down to a crawl. But it also provided her the time to refine the offering and the business model. I will cover the current offerings and business model in a subsequent post.
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