Rack & Riddle opens shop in Healdsburg
Rack & Riddle Custom Wine Services recently debuted a sparkling new Healdsburg facility to match its sparkling wares.
Previously located in Mendocino County, the winemakers now operate a 67,000-square-foot facility on Moore Lane in Healdsburg, in addition to a location in Geyserville that opened in January of this year. The Healdsburg facility focuses on sparkling winemaking production, as well as white wine fermentation and still wine bottling.
Originally located in Hopland, Rack & Riddle’s move to Healdsburg and Geyserville has increased their total space from 100,000 to 120,000 square feet. Yet according to Bruce Lundquist, who co-owns Rack & Riddle with Rebecca Faust, that extra square footage may not prove enough for their developing business.
Over the next 12 months, Lundquist anticipates that the company will process 1 million wine cases, with the move to Healdsburg drumming up additional clientele.
“I don’t think anybody in Sonoma County would have a hard time arguing that Healdsburg right now is white-hot both as a city and just as an epicenter of the Sonoma County wine industry,” Lundquist said. “And us being able to move into Healdsburg was very fortuitous.”
Since moving, Rack & Riddle has fielded interest from both new and current clients who wish to increase the amount of wine they produce through the facility. “We’ve made ourselves very convenient,” Lundquist said. “The opportunity to be back here will be very good for Rack & Riddle, and produce its own challenges.”
According to Lundquist, challenges include finding adequate space to handle forthcoming demands for Rack & Riddle’s winemaking services. The company is already considering the need to find additional space before next crush.
Before creating Rack & Riddle, co-owners Faust and Lundquist trace their working relationship to the 1996, when their respective careers at Piper Sonoma, a sparkling wine producer, and J Vineyards caused them to meet.
“We ended up across the negotiation table from each other,” Lundquist recalled. The two became friends, and their entrepreneurial ambitions led them to eventually found Rack & Riddle in 2007.
Rather than enter a competitive and expensive marketplace with their own brand, Lundquist said that he and Faust identified an entry point associated with the lack of custom sparkling wine producers. “There really wasn’t anybody of note doing that,” he said. “Because [Faust] and I both had background in sparkling wine, we kind of naturally gravitated in that direction.”
Lundquist said that Rack & Riddle’s first clients consisted of small brands, or brands that produced a relatively small number of sparkling wine cases. “As the years have gone by and we’ve gained credibility… we’ve been gathering bigger and bigger clients,” he said.
While continuing to focus on custom crush and related services, Rack & Riddle has also started a winery that offers both sparkling wines and still single varietals. “We’re in the infancy of that particular business,” Lundquist said.
Part of Rack & Riddle’s success, Lundquist said, is due to its special attention to sparkling wine production, as well as an industry-wide move to outsourced production, as wineries would rather focus capital on sales and marketing than on processing equipment that would remain idle for part of the year.
“I think what we’re seeing is just the wine industry overall is not putting money into property and equipment,” he said. As people continue to enter the wine business, Lundquist expects the demand for custom services to continue to grow.
For a capital-intensive industry, “the barrier to entry is put much lower if you can go ahead and have a service provider help you with your wine product,” he said.
The move to Sonoma County also allowed Rack & Riddle to offer its clients more winemaking options, including multiple bottle lines, a new 140-bottle-per-minute still wine line, almost 2 million gallons of stainless steel storage and fermentation vessels, on-site laboratories and increased storage.
Rack & Riddle Custom Wine Services is located in Healdsburg at 499 Moore Lane and in Geyserville at 4001 Hwy. 128. For more information, visit www.rackandriddle.com or call (707) 433-8400.
