hello everybody welcome to another episode of soup an already climbing up and down the garden a food chain and today i'm really excited to have my guest with me today lisa van den walden b definitely him mouthfull q who is the founder of great finale which is based right here locally in flemington off of bottles road and it's really a pleasure to have you here and for our viewers to learn about your business why you started and to actually know that there's a wonderful experience of wine making literally around the corner from us so without further ado welcome to the show and are welcome and to be part of our audience today so everybody i have been familiar with great finale now maybe about three years and i will talk more about it but i along with a group of friends as a wedding actually is anniversary gift for my husband a bunch of our friends we got together and we made an amazing barrel of wine at your location and we've also use your location to host who can or meet ups and various events so i'm very fortunate to have gotten to know you over this time and to know you as someone who's a minute mazing wine maker and it is amazing host and as an entrepreneur a local entrepreneur here so i think one of the first things that the great for on insta learn is why you even that are doing this and how it came to be and you know where you came from and how you got into the wine business it all started in california ok i actually wanted to be a veterinarian when i grow up and i had u c davis on my radar as the place i wanted to go to school and that's exactly where i ended up going to school but found out early on that  i wasn't meant to be a veterinarian i continued with my biochemistry degree and as a result of that met a professor who write given you're going to winery and that's kind of how it all started roommate from napa friend who was the seller master at a restaurant in sacramento actually didn't like wine when i first got to u c davis ok and that's like the heart of where the study was yes because my  parents used to have the cardboard cartons in the refrigerator and it wasn't very good wine and so i just didn't think i liked it but a friend made it his mission changed that him boy did he do a good job because look i am today exactly how i when i graduated from school i did not go into the wine industry i have a black and at that time the business model was only vineyards grow grapes harvest the grapes make wine and sell the wine and i was like nah i can't do that whole first part whole vertical so i ended up going into the aerospace industry initially and then the pharmaceutical industry but i continued to grow in my knowledge of wine continuing to taste and learn and develop knowledge better knowledge for it i eventually was promoted through my pharmaceutical company job which brought me back to new jersey through my husband i met a couple who was making wine and a hands on winery knowing my background and my love for wine they invited me to be part of the process when a full went through with them  gee i can do this and when the time was right i opened up great finale and flemington wanted to bring the fun of wine making it to the tri state area oh that's wonderful so when did you open a  how long has it been now we are going on our seventh year seventh year so we thank you we opened april second of two thousand and eleven ok you have a beautiful facility it's a beautiful  walk in and you're transported well that was the whole idea we have a sixty two hundred fifty square foot facility right now we have a main winemaking floor and then we have a twelve hundred fifty foot mezzanine that's up stairs which is actually really nice it's a nice part of the spirit because we wanted to be an experience for people i always tell my clients bring in food come early stay late you can sit at the tables and chairs up in the mezzanine and enjoy your food and beverages with your family when you're not making wine but you can overlook the wine making for and watch other people making wine while you're doing that well i have certainly done that so you have actually you have certainly done that and actually have some photos that you know kind of illustrate what an amazing experience that i and the folks that that were with me had so if we could walk through some of those photos now sure the first photo that you're looking at right now this is a picture of a very happy wine after the process is a lot of fun she's holding a crate of grapes when my clients come in they're greeted with  of grapes it takes about seven hundred fifty pounds of grapes to make a barrel of wine and they're getting fifty pounds a grape it wow ok and they're usually divided up into either eighteen or thirty six pound great pound crates depending on if the grapes are coming from the southern hemisphere or they're coming from the northern hemisphere we actually get grapes from south africa and chile in the spring and grapes from california oregon and washington in the fall so when you come in and make wine a great finale you're not making it was new jersey grapes you're making it with grapes the comes from those different areas and you're actually very selective as well you're able to really focus on getting the best grapes in for your clients to have that is the foundation for a great wine yes we only work with premium wine grape growers we have a certain set of standards that they all  w so when the grapes come in they're incredibly high quality so moving on here this is actually your group and well normally when a group comes in to make wine  so this is your group here actually taking the berries off the stem prior to the grapes going into the tub to be crushed by foot you know what kind of drove a sec the group of friends we actually when went on the barrel with some of our closest friends and it was a lovely experience and then my husband is actually from crete greece isn't and there's a history of wine making on his side of the family olive oil who grows as well as a wine and again you know the old fashioned way people used to crush the grapes with their feet way back when and the barrels and stuff and we kind of wanted to experience a little bit of that authenticity and in fact we did as you could see in the next photo so that's actually our daughter eventually and who is crushing some grapes that's right and we did it very santa to sanitary sticking our feet into a big plastic heavy duty bag but it definitely was a lot of fun and when clients come in to make wine they do have the option of doing it either way either stopping the great their feet or actually using the crush of a stammer most of our clients use the car shipper stammered has when you do a process like this it takes takes a longer time i member you had said that you had a bridal party that did it this way and it was a really fun experience for the bridal party you know it's a real connecting type of activity to do and bonding absolutely the whole bridal party in the parents of the bride and groom they went through the whole process i think their crush session actually took about four to five hours you now because they were picking the grapes right off the stem and drinking in between and usually with a group like that we have to have a designated driver because they are drinking what they're doing that and over that prolonged period you know we like to make sure that everybody gets home safe so excellent and the next photos made it is you know i even got into it crush in the grapes it really was a lot of fun definitely was a lot of fun to do that we had a lot of laughs that day and we usually put the grapes in a smaller tub and then they go into a much larger firm and roman taishan tub just makes it a little bit little bit easier to to get them crushed by with your feet when you have a smaller quantity to work with clay and i think we have another yes so this is another shot of the group the grapes those are oh yes ok holding the grapes that we had just finished crushing that day so again a wonderful bonding experience to do something like this with family and friends you know i couldn't i mean and the thing is we have to go back multiple times and we brought food every time and so the love to cook and so a couple of other folks and we set up there that mezzanine and just really made it and a whole evening experience and then you know your group definitely had a very very very special very special wine making it experience and there you are this is a that the press so the yeah session is the cross session right i mean i think what i should i should tell your viewers is yes the sequence it to make to make the wine is a ten month process i mean we literally help you make wine just like they do in a commercial winery so the first session when you come in is a crush session it's an hour long two weeks later you come back for an hour long press session your group is shown by your your press right now squeeze in that rolling out of the right and then three months later you come back for a racking event and at the end of the ten month process  come back for an hour long bottling session and like i said we encourage you to bring food and beverages make an experience out of it and actually it's really a great program i've worked with business owners even who have used this  us and they they like that social bonding aspect you know the wine making but then the before and after is also really really special and helps bring the group together interesting what was interesting too with this whole thing was just the fact that the the cake of the grapes you know after it's all pressed it was it was just amazing how condensed that was well imagine the imagine what seven hundred fifty pounds of the rates would look like if you go to the next slide you'll actually see a group that is taking apart the cake and although they've dug into it you can see one of the upper edges on one of the sides literally the the cake is about this high and that's the press being cleaned off if you imagine the press is probably about as big so that seven hundred fifty pounds of grapes has just been reduced to a barrel of wine and that material really is pretty amazing it is amazing yeah black and then one of the oldest the bottling it has the bottling so i tell people when they come in especially at the bottling time you're not  standing at the end of an assembly line with a glass of wine watching your beautifully bottle unlabeled wine coming off you're actually filling the bottles yourselves you're putting the cork in the next photo shows a group actually at the the and then you go to the labeling station which is the next slide and you actually apply the labels to your wine so everything is done on the site on premise of our place and you don't take your your wine home until it's bottle unlabeled and ready to go calais that was a lot of fun and oh yeah this is another group of your customers yes this is actually a family group this saw this group started making wine with me when shown in this picture because he has since passed away family has continued to make wine ok and he can actually see in the picture i they have multiple people in the group each group member is able to put their own label on  and certified wind judges from the american wines society come in and actually do blind tasting the size of models made by amateur winemakers and they evaluate them on a professional scale and was actually something i hadn't really thought of how i started the business but when somebody made us aware of the competition you know we thought it be a great idea for our clients to enter their wines and you know hey definitely definitely as a matter of fact this is the wine audience that we made and the label that we created and because it was some of our closest friends that went in the barrel we called it friendship and we chose dressed wine there you go toward winning wine thank you so much it was really such a wonderful experience and i'm sure we're going to be repeating it again because rick perry getting near the end of our our stash so your clients probably or your viewers probably want to us to enjoy so very nice definitely very nice you are starting to talk about some of the things that our audience might like to know  sessions of grapes all the way to bottles label score wine in the bottle and taking home so that's around sixteen dollars a bottle the more you make the better the price for bottles so by the time you're up at the barrel level you're probably looking at twelve to thirteen dollars a bottle which is what we need to run the local somalis have told us that our wine is comparable with twenty five to forty dollars bottles of wine so wine lovers in or wine maker yes well definitely been able to do that effectively that's for sure i think another thing that would be really neat for our audience to know a little bit more about is from the entrepreneurial side of things of you know opening up your business seven years ago some of the successes some of the trials and tribulations some of the difficulties perhaps of having a wine establishment or challenges you know how do you get the word out anything you'd like to franchise i hadn't been in business for five years so it took probably three or four approaching three or four different financial institutions and i had a really nice business plan put together and the fact that i didn't have a history and i had all the collateral that was needed i really needed to find the right partner to help me with the financing and unity bank or was the the  bank who stepped up to the plate at the recommendation of you know a very well established businessperson in the flemington community that are so i was i was very lucky the second big challenge was owning i had found two locations neither one was zoned for my type of business one of the the and they were both in different townships one of the townships didn't want to change the zoning serving wine to people and then talking about you know the different flavors and nuances of the wine the work that we do in my winery is pretty down and dirty and you know you were there doing yeah you were in the work you people who are really interested in and you know willing to do that kind of work has been a real challenge for me but in spite of those things you know here we are almost seven years later with  a very successful business now getting the word out i you know i've i definitely use the newspaper initially to place ads and things like that but what i'm really focusing on right now  is you know online social media things like that do you unwind since wednesday every week ok you know i do a lot of social media postings trying to get the word out that way and i've been around enough now so there's  local writers who you know now publicize things for me because they're aware of me i make them aware of what i'm doing and then they they broadcast it out and show up  and also online i really think social media and online is really the way to go with my business and word of mouth go say word of mouth must be very important very very important to have happy winemakers and then they tell their friends and i mean that was the case in point you know we've hosted meet ups here and they know at least one of the members and that are coming in making a barrel with other folks networking is spent and working groups also yeah but you're right i mean the proof is really in the glass  o the fact that the wine is really good the fact that you know third party judges from a prestigious group like the american wine society are giving wines that we've helped our clients make you know the metals that that they're getting up and getting out and people talking about how good the wine is and sharing the wine with other people and letting them know that they made it that's what we get a lot of customers that way too ok so what's on your wish list were do you think you know which are like to see the business go in and are there some types of business that you that are better for you than others or this is just you know what's the right mix because  business from all you know from individuals and give corporate it's probably something that would be great to have more of absolutely i mean i honestly i love working with all the different groups  big chunk of of who i work with people who make wine with me both seasons year after year after year our family and friend groups that come in so i do i do get a lot of that lately though i have been getting a lot of business owners who are doing team building events who are doing client appreciation of events i had a financial advisor bring his a list clients and had four sessions to socialize with them and to make this wine and what a great i yeah that's a great idea to do that it's very anything about it's very cost effective and you know you're bringing your best clients are doing something together you see things in a different light and look at with one with the youth if that you develop a whole different yeah you know socialization them level of interaction right and then the other the other group of people that's really starting to find our space and work with us in making wine are the brides and grooms the bridal parties and as a matter of fact a lot of them are doing bridal showers or wedding showers at my place where they're combining you know one or more aspects of the wine making we had one bride and groom she did her bridal shower there the the groom to be showed up they threw the first crate of grapes into the crusher and then everybody who was there for the shower help and that will then the remaining sessions they came in with you know a select group of only and friends finished up the process now they traditional catering hall to do something like this you know just kind of mix it up a bit because you know showers tend to be very conventional usually what a great idea well and the people who are doing showers now are looking for different they're looking for an experience they don't i most of time i have the you know maids of honor coming in and saying now we don't want to do those regular bridal shower games you know so we're helping them with guests a member of corks or design a wine label for the bride and groom or is great finale dot com you can reach us by phone at nine o eight two three seven zero three zero two we are on facebook pinterest twitter or instagram i have a page you'll find us sounds good everywhere it's got a great name you actually you know found a great name great finale great play on words and i have to say that for audience today this was a wonderful show to be able to bring what you do to everybody so everyone thank you again for watching food put your tasty tales of climbing up and down the gore my food chain looking forward to see you at our next episode and again lisa thank you so much