It sounds like a dream to many cubicle rats and road warriors slaving away in corporate jobs, and to many doctors, lawyers and other professionals. To own a winery and live a rural way of life, producing a luxury product that's one of the joys of life. That's an awfully enticing vision.
Indeed, many people in Washington and around the country have succumbed to that dream, swapping their suits for jeans and boots and starting wineries.
Today, Washington state has about 530 wineries, more than double the number six years ago. New wineries open in this state at a rate of one every 10 days or so.
While there are no statistics on how many were started by people who were not previously in the wine industry, anecdotal evidence indicates that the number is substantial. They are drawn by the fact that Washington, already the second-largest wine producing state in the U.S., is surging in national and international appeal among wine consumers. There are no statistics on the number of Washington wineries that fail.
"It's a combination of the romantic appeal of wine and the recognition that consumer demand and consumption continue to grow," said Ryan Pennington, spokesman for the Washington Wine Commission.
But there are significant pitfalls for the unwary.
Startup costs can easily hit half a million dollars before a winery sells a single bottle. And owners must work long hours, develop a wide range of industrial skills -- or hire others who have them -- and become shrewd business operators and marketers as well.
Kathy Charlton, Olympic Cellars
In 2003, her second year as a winery operator, Kathy Charlton and her colleagues at Olympic Cellars in Port Angeles were working hard on blending a distinctive table wine.
"Ladies, I'm exhausted," the former corporate executive finally announced to her minority partners, Molly Rivard and Libby Sweetser. "This working girl has got to go home."
The phrase stuck. They were three middle-aged women, all in their second careers, and they found themselves cleaning barrels, punching down and shoveling grapes, working with truckers -- jobs they never previously imagined themselves doing. So they created the Working Girl series of wines.
In line with the theme and their social consciousness, they decided to donate 2 percent of Working Girl gross sales to community programs serving women, such as women's health clinics. Lately, they've invited women to take a "girlfriend road trip," a weekend of wine touring in the North Olympic Peninsula guided by their itinerary.
Remarkably, the winery Charlton and her husband, Ralph, bought in 1999 without really meaning to get into the wine business has been profitable since breaking even in the first year she took over operations, 2001. That's highly unusual for a new winery. She attributes a good part of that success to her 25 years of experience in finance and marketing.
"I'm very focused and I know how to put my arms around a business," she said.
Before acquiring the winery, Charlton was living a radically different life in Dallas. She served on the management team of a division of Texas Instruments with offices all over the world, and traveled a lot. She had remarried.
She found out her mother-in-law had co-signed a loan to Olympic Cellars, which was struggling. It was either buy the winery or watch her mother-in-law take a big hit.
"So we bought the winery," Charlton, an engaging storyteller, recalls. "It made good dinner conversation until we figured out what we were in for. We thought we could run it from Texas. That was a joke."
In 2001, Texas Instruments offered her early retirement. She took it, and she and her husband, who runs his own direct marketing business, decided to move to Sequim, give the winery six months, then probably shut it down.
"I thought I needed one additional wine to do a graceful shutdown," she said. But that wine, a Lemberger, won a gold medal in the Tri-Cities Wine Competition in 2002. It pushed Charlton over the line. "I said, 'I think I can do this.' Wine can sucker and seduce you in."
She had a steep learning curve. Still, she shrewdly outsourced functions like bottling and marketed her wines aggressively both to local tourists, through the winery's tasting room located in an old barn, and through a wine club she established.
Olympic Cellars, which now produces 14,000 cases a year, also sells its wine -- priced at $12 to $25 a bottle -- through distributors in 18 states. She just returned from a marketing trip to Florida.
"When you can share the stories and bring the winery to the customer, it's so much better," she said.
At 57, this working girl still has a few more goals to achieve before planning an exit strategy. "You keep on wanting to do the next thing and the next," she said. "I don't want to say, 'If only I had done that.'"
