Pick a mentor and work at his or her vineyard. If you still haven’t sobered up from wanting to enter an occupation where half of the start-ups fail, test your soil and well water. If they are within acceptable parameters, pick a location in a wide-open area, at least 150 feet from trees or shrubs. Also, get to know the neighbors. Drift from a nearby farmer’s herbicide could harm your vines.
Then, open your checkbook. Start-up costs include money for trellises, irrigation, and surprisingly one of the cheaper items, the vines.
“It costs between $10,000 and $20,000 an acre to establish a vineyard, without a well, without deer fencing,” said Penny S. Adams, a viticulture advisor with the Texas AgriLife Extension Service.
If the pests and disease are held at bay for three years, you can begin to sell grapes. According to the experts, net profit per acre could look something like this:
Year: 3 4 5
Estimated net: $679 $2,136 $3,336
“There’s not a lot of things that you can get that kind of yield off of, per year, in terms of dollars,” Ms. Adams said. “It can work for you if you can put the management skills into the right site.”
The average life span of a productive wine grapevine is 20 years.
