Bacchus Winemaking Club

We’ve been making wine at Bacchus since 2004. We just love it. It is great wine at a great price, and we love being part of the process and having a healthy stash of our own wine with our own label. Dom and Gloria and the rest of the crew are just terrific, and have become like family to us.
We typically get the Napa Cab grapes and opt for blending just before bottling. That means, we crush straight cabernet sauvignon, and let that mature for almost two years. About a month before bottling we’ll sit down with the winemaker and experiment. With small volumes we’ll play around with adding 10% sangiovese or 3% petit verdot, or a dose of montepulciano, or whatever seems to fit. Sometimes we go with an addition, sometimes we just let the cab speak for itself. It is a very rewarding way to enjoy wine.
And as I wrote in the Domenico review, their facility is terrific for holding events.

I went here for a holiday party and thought it was pretty awesome. It’s basically a gigantic cool looking warehouse lined w/​barrels, complete with romantic lighting and ambiance. The company had hired a taco truck, which they drove into the warehouse (could have been tacky, but was actually completely amazing) & had an awesome cheese, cracker & fruit tray w/​a dessert station as well. The coolest part was that we were able to bottle our own wines during the party and take them home (I’m enjoying a glass now & it is pretty darn good). There was room for live music & a nice little couch seating area in addition to the bar, a number of regular tables & cocktail tables.
I am in the midst of planning my wedding and after going here, I kind of wished I hadn’t already booked my venue. Word on the street was that this was supposed to be a budget venue for the company too– so I can’t imagine it even cost that much and everything looked really impressive on the inside (the outside was another matter).
As for the people that run it– I’ve got the same name as one of the people who started it (& it’s a rare name), but they didn’t seem all that interested. However, they were totally willing to sell me 2 wine glasses off the bar for nearly nothing so that I could give them to my dad as a Christmas gift with the wine (which were all magically emblazoned w/​his name– also a very rare name that one of the dudes in this family had), so props for that.
If you want to hold an event at a winery, but can’t afford their prices, def check out this place– you might find exactly what you are looking for.

I’m having a hard time deciding whether to give this place three or four stars, but since overall I had a good time, I’m rounding up.
My fiancé and I came here with a deal from Living Social for a «wine making experience.» The deal was a bit on the pricier side ($ 120), but it also came with six bottles of wine.
Throughout the night we were able to taste about seven different wines and were also given several cheese pairings and a brownie, all of which were pretty delicious.
Part of the deal was also to bottle our own wine to take home. Fun!
The only real downsides were that I was expecting it to be more like a class, which it wasn’t at all. We had a quick intro to the facility and short tour, then bottled our own wine, which only took a few minutes. While I wasn’t expecting to go out and harvest and ferment our own grapes, since it was called «wine making,» I thought there’d be a little more to it.
I also couldn’t help but think of what a clever advertisement the deal was for the facility, which was smart on their part, but also evident throughout the night as we learned about the actual wine making club and were reminded many times that cases of wine were available for purchase.
Either way, any event that involves wine and cheese makes me happy, so I’d say it was a success.