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Ken Smith/Turnagain Times |
By Ken Smith
Turnagain Times
Bob Waites has big plans for retirement, but it doesn’t entail sailing around the world or buying a condo in Hawaii. Instead, Waites wants to build a winery in Girdwood and market his Alaskan wines to a mass audience of tourists and locals alike.
Waites approached the Girdwood Board of Supervisors at their meeting May 18, seeking a letter of non-objection to transfer a liquor (winery) license to Girdwood to start the winery. He also attended the most recent Girdwood Land Use Committee meeting seeking support. The LUC supported it and the GBOS voted 4-0 in support.
Next up in the public process are the Anchorage Assembly and Planning and Zoning Commission.
Assuming there will be no opposition there, Waites hopes to transfer his liquor license to Girdwood and acquire a land use permit to build the winery facility.
He’s eyeing two lots for purchase downtown behind the Mercantile in a wooded parcel on the corner of Girdwood and Holmgren Place.
Waites said he’s got a blueprint for the design of the building and is turning it over to Girdwood based Z-Architects to refine and implement the design.
The winery will include a wine tasting bar, a shipping and receiving area, retail location, and cold storage facility.
“We’re looking to build an 8,000 square foot building, with 4,000 square feet on the top floor for my wife, Julie and I to live in,” he told the Times after he spoke at the GBOS meeting. “The bottom floor will be the winery.”
Once the winery is built, Waites is looking to market his wine to the throngs of tour companies that pass through Glacier Valley each summer as well as local visitors.
Waites works for the Anchorage School District as an electronics technician and his wife works for the state Department of Transportation.
When the winery is up and running, Waites said his wife will help out with the day-to-day operation of the business. He also expects to hire six full-time year-round workers and 12-14 full-timers during the summer.
Waites estimates the cost of the entire operation, staff included, should come in just under $1 million dollars.
“I’ll have to go to the bank to finance at least 80 percent,” he said. “I’m going to be selling my home in Anchorage to cover what I can’t finance.”
It’s a big investment, and like all start-ups, there is risk involved, but Waites is determined to succeed.
“At this point, I’m 80 percent sure this will come to fruition,” he said.
Waites passion for wine making started in 1999 when he started making wine for family events and Holiday gatherings, “each bottle consumed with delight and requests for more,” he writes in a brochure he provides at his retail location, Waites Winery, in Rabbit Creek.
His wine is made from different blends and recipes that he’s perfected over the years. Obviously there are no vineyards in Alaska, but Waites isn’t making your traditional wines from grapes only. Instead, he uses a combination of grapes, fruits, berries and other ingredients, mostly from Alaska and gathered in the wild, not from farms or commercial productions, which can make quantities limited.
Waites processes the harvest himself, but he said he will pay local harvesters for berries. He also has a contract with Seldovia Native corporation for harvesting berries in Homer and the Kachemak Bay area.
“I do not want to take away from the local people’s harvest,” he said. “I’m not paying commercial people to go out and pick the area. That’s why we’re going down to Seldovia, so we don’t hit this area hard.”
In order to produce six-and-a-half gallons of wine, Waites said five gallons of local berries would need to be harvested.
And by using a majority of local fruits, he said he can keep his “Made in Alaska” sticker.
Some of the grapes in his wine, like the Alaskan Apple Crisp wine, includes White Riesling grapes from the Pacific Northwest, but he also uses local ingredients—40 percent Green Apples and 20 percent Crab Apples.
The end result is award-winning wines that are uniquely Alaskan.
Waites’ Alaskan Apple Crisp wine won first place in the White wine category at the 2005 Alaska State Fair, and the Midnight Sun Delight, a blend of half Blackberry Shiraz from Southern Australia and half Alaskan Blueberry, took first place in the Red wine category at the State Fair that same year.
Now Waites is ready to take his winemaking skills to the next level and enter the highly competitive world of commercial wine sales.
At the Girdwood winery, Waites expects to produce approximately 700 gallons of fruit wine per month with 6,000 bottles in cold storage.
And why Girdwood for his commercial wine venture?
“Logistically, this is an ideal place for it,” Waites said. “We were looking to renovate the building where the Girdwood Clinic used to be, but there were restrictions on parking, and the cost for renovation was too much. So, we decided to start from scratch.”
Waites is looking to purchase the two lots behind the Mercantile with a combined footage of 130 feet by 100 feet.
“If we can stay on track and on budget,” he said, “we should be opening in summer of 2011.”
That just happens to be the same year he retires from his school district job.