We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ashley Reller. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ashley below.

Alright, Ashley thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.

Family is what inspired us to start our business in the first place and continues to play an important role when operating our business. We wanted to have more time to spend together as a family. With both my husband, Dan, and I in full-time careers, we spent so much of our time in the office or on the computer. We believed starting our own business would be something we could do together as well as something we could start that could make a positive impact on our neighborhood and community. We’re fortunate that our 9-year old son, River, loves being involved in so much of the business operation. Being involved in the business with us, he learns invaluable life lessons. We would love for him to continue his passion for our business but of course he will have full freedom to choose his own life path as he grows up.
One of the benefits of working together as a family is that we can be together and build something together. Another benefit is that we have the close relationship where we can be completely honest with each other without the added worry of being “professional.” When there’s something to be done or said, you don’t have to beat around the bush. We can just say things how they are. I believe this allows us to be more productive on a day-to-day basis by just getting to the point.
One of the biggest challenges of working as a family is making sure we take time out of our day and week to just be a family. As small business owners, we always have enough things to do to fill all the hours in the day so it’s easy to get caught up working all the time. It’s easy to always “talk shop.” Sometimes it takes a bit of extra effort to take a step back and be together as a family rather than business partners.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Vintage Escapes Winery is a veteran-owned, family-operated farm winery located in southern Minnesota. Located on historic Dodd Road, our vintage-inspired tasting room overlooks the vineyard, Hunt Lake, and the stunning countryside. Not only do we have a beautiful indoor space with table and bar seating, but we also have ample outdoor space consisting of a large outdoor pavilion, patio, and deck. All of our wines are made right on site. Our wines have won several awards in international wine competitions, including Best of Show in Red Wine for our Marquette. We also recently won 3 double-gold medals in a single year with our Marquette, Frontenac and Marquette Reserve wines.
We are open year round and we host fun events and live music throughout the year. In the spring we have both an Adult Easter Egg Hunt and a Kids’ Easter Egg Hunt. In the fall, we have a Halloween Festival with a Hallo-Wine Trail. Several other fun events are scheduled throughout the year.
We offer food at the tasting room such as shareable plates, flatbreads, melts and dessert. Out newest addition to our beverages are rotating high-end bourbons that guests can enjoy a flight. Bourbons are also served as 1 oz or 2 oz pours – neat or on the rocks. We also offer beer, cider, and wine cocktails with wine slushies coming soon.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

All of our wines are made right on site by Dan and I. We also grow about 3 acres of cold hardy wine grapes that Dan tends to one-by-one from late winter to the end of fall. Before starting Vintage Escapes Winery, we did a lot of home winemaking with several batches of wine. We couldn’t actually even begin making wine commercially until our entire winery building was constructed and finished to manufacturing standards. It then needed to be properly inspected and licensed before we could even bring in the grapes to make our first commercially-crafted batch of wine. Home winemaking was the best way to get lots of hands-on experience needed to prepare ourselves for producing commercially-crafted wine. The majority of our winemaking knowledge was developed through attending seminars and self-studying. I was a credentialed actuary prior to leaving the profession for the wine business. With the hundreds of hours of studying that I had to do for those credentials, I sometimes think of myself as a “professional studier.” I love learning by reading and doing and found success in building knowledge through self-study. Dan and I became a great team with my ability to learn the chemistry and technical processes of winemaking combined with Dan’s great problem-solving skills and ability to work with all sorts of equipment. The most important part of the process for learning how to make wine is to get your hands dirty and make some wine. Making wine is just as much an art as it is a science. You’re never working with the same ingredients. The chemistry and structure of the grapes can be so different year to year. You have to have the ability to look at the numbers but also have the intuition to know what to do next with the wine to get it where you want it to ultimately be. There’s no step-by-step recipe to follow. That’s the beauty about wine. It’s like a living thing, always changing and transforming. I didn’t even touch on the grape-growing part of the manufacturing process which is a whole other animal indeed!

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Funding a new winery & vineyard from scratch proved to be a big challenge. There is quite the cash-flow discrepancy when starting a winery because of the several months it takes to make your first batch of shelf-ready wine. In order to take in the first grapes to make wine, all the permits and licenses had to be in place. Because we were building on bare land, this meant first building the structure. We had to put in a brand new well and septic. We needed to bring natural gas and electricity to the site. The structure needed to be finished to manufacturing code with several inspections completed. Once all that was done, we could then get inspected for our final licenses needed to bring in grapes and start making wine. However, we still had nothing to sell for several months after that because grape wine typically takes between 6-12 months before it’s bottled and shelf-ready. Several months is a long time to have a lot of initial capital put into a business with nothing to sell. It took 4 1/2 years to plant the vineyard, prep the land, build the structure, get our license, make our first vintages of commercially-crafted wines and get the wines on the shelf. During these 4 1/2 years, both Dan and I were also working our full-time jobs. Although these were challenging years with very little of the much-desired family and downtime, we are so grateful we had good jobs to help us fund our dream. We still had to rely heavily on loans, but without our full-time jobs, we wouldn’t have been able to get the loans and funding needed to front all the initial capital and cover us for the several months of no revenue flow.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.VintageEscapesWinery.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vintageescapes/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vintageescapeswinery