About Crushpad
Who is Crushpad anyway? Well, we’re a combination of wine industry veterans and technology industry refugees that want to liberate winemaking from the stereotype of the 5th generation wine family living on the chateau with the Golden Retriever. By bringing winemaking to the city, augmenting it with education and support, and taking care of the time-consuming parts, we want to enable anyone with a serious interest in wine to participate in the magic of winemaking.
And winemaking is magic. Although the process is somewhat understood, there is something very personal and very rewarding about squishing some grapes, turning it into wine, and then sharing this with the world. Until you’ve done it, it seems like some abstract thing that you could never do well. Once you’ve done it, you can’t imagine not doing it. This is a warning – Winemaking is Addictive.
Some people want to make enough wine to create a full-time profession out of it, but most of you have day jobs. And that’s our primary focus – enabling people with day jobs to make wine for both personal and economic reasons.
Crushpad was created out of our own experiences – taking a two hour lunch to zoom up to Napa to check on sugar levels, staying up until midnight cleaning the press, waking up at 5AM to punch down and then speeding down to a sales call with grape skins under your nails – it’s a bit much even for the diehards. So what if we provided a convenient facility and online tools that enabled people from all over the world to make wine and spend as much or as little time as they wanted without fear that the fermentation was going to get out of control? While we’re at it, why not educate people and help them connect with folks with similar interests. Finally, if we’re doing all this – why not help people from across the country that want to turn their passion for wine into a business.
