Dunne on Wine: Making the leap to commercial winery

As you step into the Lodi winery m2 Wines, don't move too fast. You could run into the tasting counter – it's that close to the door.

Gregarious Layne Montgomery is likely to be behind the counter, squeezing his tall frame between barrels and bar, eager to pour tastes.

The winery forklift is parked at one end of the short counter. A gas-fueled space heater hisses and glows on the floor, nipping at the chill like a small dog. Garbage trucks pull into a transfer station across the road.

Welcome to the glamorous world of California winemaking in the early 21st century.

"I've got to learn to stop apologizing for being in this stinky little warehouse," says Montgomery.

While he and his business partner, Chris Matheny, are self-conscious about their humble surroundings – a plain stall in a row of identical bays in a steel shell in an industrial park – it's a step up in space from the Elk Grove garage where they made their first 60-gallon barrel of wine with the harvest of 2000.

It also represents the fulfillment of a vision shared by many home winemakers, the transition from amateur vintners to commercial.

Theirs isn't an overnight success story, but it's close. Neither had made a drop of wine before 1999, when Montgomery and his wife, Karen, an acquisitions official with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, tried their hand with 30 gallons.

The next spring, Montgomery met Matheny, a longtime wine enthusiast who was working part-time in the tasting room of Charles B. Mitchell Vineyards in El Dorado County.

Then, as now, Matheny had a full-time day job – chief financial officer for Capitol Builders Hardware of Sacramento – but he already was thinking of creating a winery, and he saw the Mitchell duty as a way to get a better grip on the inner workings of the trade.

That fall, Matheny and Montgomery, who long has worked in television broadcasting, communications and marketing but now works full-time for m2 Wines, teamed up to start making home wine at Matheny's Elk Grove residence.

"That was the year we learned you can't make good wines out of crappy grapes," recalls Montgomery.

They got other lessons from winemaking courses at the University of California, Davis, and from seasoned commercial winemakers who stepped up as mentors. As chief judge for the California State Fair home wine competition in 2003 and 2004, Montgomery also was hanging out with and learning from fellow neophytes.

Early on, at a meeting of the Sacramento Home Winemakers, grocer Darrell Corti, who often evaluates wines for the group's members, praised one of the pair's zinfandels as "the best old-vine zinfandel from Lodi I've tasted," says Montgomery.

"Coming from Darrell, you don't know what that means, but we took it as a compliment," he adds.

By 2004, the two felt ready to go commercial and made their first 750 cases of m2 Wines in borrowed quarters at a winery in the Sierra foothills.

For Matheny, this was the next logical step toward realizing the winery on a hill he'd envisioned for himself since moving to California in 1995.

Montgomery, on the other hand, gropes for an explanation as to why he made such a bold move.

"I don't really have a concise, clever, definitive answer," he says. "I think it came down to agreeing that we had to try it or we'd regret that we never did. It was a challenge we had to take on. So many people tried to talk us out of it. They reminded us that the business is competitive, and that anyone with a packet of yeast and some grapes thinks he's a winemaker. But all businesses are competitive."

The two, with their spouses, do virtually everything themselves, from looking for choice vineyards and negotiating to buy grapes to knocking on the doors of retail shops and restaurants in hopes they will stock their wines. (Matheny's wife, Diana, whose day job involves handling accounts for United Parcel Service, is the lead sales representative for the winery.)

Matheny handles regulatory and financial matters; Montgomery pampers the wines from fermentation to bottling. They share winemaking and tasting-room duties, agreeing that their house style runs to rich, complex and balanced wines more representative of variety and place than high-tech wizardry.

About the writer:

• Call Bee wine columnist Mike Dunne, (916) 321-1143. Read his blog at www.sacbee.com/appetizers. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/dunne.