The business end of the Grapekeeper rent-a-vine program

Grapekeeper is a multi-faceted, sustainably oriented, luxury rent-a-vine program that is the brainchild of Portuguese Environmental Engineer and Entrepreneur (and Winelover) Ana Monforte Weijters. After its initial launch in 2018, the company rebooted in 2019 guided by the business model illustrated below. 

Entry requirements for producers are (i) sustainability and (ii) quality. Ana mourned the fact that sustainability had almost become a marketing gimmick; it is fundamental to her business. She defines it as: "the capacity to endure in a relatively ongoing way across various domains of life. To use resources without depletion or, even better, with regeneration, to produce experiences as products that enrich the consumer as well as the other contributors in the production chain."

Grapekeeper offers customers the ability to rent vineyards in one of three sizes from a current list of seven producers drawn from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and Portugal (see Table 1 below). The customer can invest in one of three size classes with an estimated number of bottles promised at each level. The estimated number of bottles for a given plot size will vary from producer to producer based on vineyard yields. The level one offering promises an estimated number of bottles plus a number of benefits while levels two and three includes all of the activities of the preceding levels plus a higher number of bottles coincident with the increased plot sizes.

Table 1. Producers profiled on the Grapekeeper website.

Partner	Location	Cultivar(s)	Wine Style	Offerings
Stafelter Hof	Mosel	Organically farmed Riesling	Still white	150 - 450 sq m; 600 - 900 sq m; 1050 - 1350 sq m
Selva Capuzza	Lake Garda	Turbiana	Still white	100 - 300 sq m; 400 - 700 sq m; 1050 - 1350 sq m
Vinyes del Terrer	Tarragona	Garnacha Tinta, Cabernet Sauvignon	Still red (85% Garnacha Tinta)	200 - 800 sq m; 1000 - 1600 sq m; 1800 - 2000 sq m
Vega Aixlà	Montsant	Organically farmed Tempranillo	Still red	200 - 800 sq m; 1000 - 1600 sq m; 1800 - 2000 sq m
Rivetto	Piedmont	Barbera	Still red	100 - 300 sq m; 400 - 600 sq m; 700 - 1000 sq m
Serveaux Fils	Champagne	Pinot Meunier	Champagne	100 - 300 sq m; 400 - 600 sq m; 700 - 1200 sq m
Vinha do Carrel	Douro	40+; 80 - 100-year-old vines	Field-blend still red	300 - 400 sq m;500 - 700 sq m; 800 - 1000 sq m

The customer is always invited to visit the vineyard to discuss sustainability and its influence on, among other things, wine quality, regional sustainability, and the communities that are dependent on wine production for their sustenance. There is also a fun aspect to the program as the customer can bring family and friends along to aid in the harvesting of his/her plot. Ana has indicated that a number of new producers will be added to the fold over the course of the next three months.

Ana defines Grapekeeper success as:

• Getting wines to clients
• Financial health
• Seeing the people around her happy.

The key, she said, is health: health of the people, health of the ecosystem, and health of the business. For her, people are the most important part of this venture.

Ana Monforte Weijters
(Courtesy Grapekeeper)

As far as the future is concerned, she wants to be more inclusive and to continue to grow the business. She sees a lot of potential for client growth as well as geographical expansion of the producer cohort. She also sees opportunities to build a raft of communities as both the producer and client groups grow; but that is down the road a bit.

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What are the future prospects for the business? Jamie Goode is complimentary when he notes that Ana has teamed up "with some serious wine producers." One of the keys to the venture's success will be its rate of customer acquisition and development of a more durable marketing strategy to fuel that growth. Today customer marketing is primarily word-of-mouth; that is not a strategy with legs.

Ana has been critical to the company's success to date and will continue to be so in the future. She possesses a number of qualities that will stand her -- and the business -- in good stead going forward:

• She is a visionary but is also able to effectively communicate that vision to enlist prospects and to operationalize the concepts as key elements in a going concern
• She is highly motivated and extremely hard-working. It seems that every time I communicate with her she is either driving or flying to or from a producer meeting. One thing that she has the be careful of is not being seduced by the sexiness of producer visits to the detriment of customer-acquisition efforts
• She is thoughtful, yet approachable, and is well-versed in issues relating to sustainability and regenerative agriculture
• She is empowered, driven, fearless, and in possession of an entrepreneurial spirit but is also warm-hearted, unselfish, and willing to pitch in to help.

Grapekeeper is in good hands.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme

The conception and design of Grapekeeper, the Champagne of rent-a-vine programs

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.

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.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme