Come on.
(Inaudible)
Host: How far apart are your wineries?
David: Probably...
Emily: Oh, Its two different ones?
Dave: probably about two hours.
Emily: they work together. You guys own two different vineyards or...?
Dave: Oh, he's Nappa Valley
I'm Emily Geiger, and I am a Co-owner for craft cultural labs in Hancock Michigan.
I'm Dave House, and I graduated in 1965
in electrical engineering
my name is Tom Porter, and I graduated from Michigan Tech in 1968. With a degree electrical engineering.
I'm Ryan Gray, I am the Co-owner of Electric Brewing Supply
I graduate from Tech in 2007.
I'm Katherine Gray or Katie Gray. I graduated in 2007.
Welcome everybody thanks so much for
coming.
We just want to have a conversation today about wine beer life and the MichiganTech connection
and I thought we could
start off first just tell me about yourself.
so, I  know that wine making is a passion of yours Dave,
because when I look you up on
LinkedIn and that's how you were listed
I was very confused. I was like, is this same Dave House?
And after doing a little...I figuring it out that and I was like okay cleary it's a priority.
So, what brought
you to winemaking?
Michigan Tech and alcohol, they may go together I don't know.
Well, first I get developed the taste for
good wine on intel expense accounts
I was the one guy on the executive
staff that had come from the computer Industry.
And the rest of them were
physicists and chemists
So when a customer came into town, the
sales guy would ask me to have dinner with him.
they'd hand me the wine list and I handed its the sales guy.
And after about five years of that I said give that to me.
I've had these, i've had these. Lets have this one or this one.
And so, having acquired a taste for good wine and other people's budgets.
I built a house. I fell in love with this ah,
hilltop ridge 20 years before and managed to buy it and design and build the house and
and so they architect and the builder, the interior designer and the landscape architect
were having a ball spending my
money.
Because the stock market was going up and I wasn't putting an limits on them.
there's this long curved driveway what are we going to do along the drivway?
He says "Ah, California wild flowers."
I said "really? Wouldn't it be nice to
drive in through a vineyard?
The architect said, "yeah, that'd be great!"
the landscape architect said, "I've never done a vineyard."
And I pointed up to Jeffrey Patterson's house and his vineyard.
And I said, "Jeffrey Patterson's one of best wine makers in California.
He lives right there, let's get him down here. So he came down and looked at it and he says
"yeah, yeah this would be a really good place to grow grapes.
And you know what? You grow grapes I'll buy them from you."
Following retirement from industry
I bought a vineyard.
Makes a lot of sense right?
and it was an established vineyard with
red grapes predominnetly , cabaret and sera.
The following year, this was 2005 in following year, we built an underground winery.
Along with the tasting room and barrel storage it's about 17,000 square feet underground.
with a 515 ft tunnel that goes from onside of the mountain on our property to the other.
when I graduated I went to work for IBM
and an older gentleman who was into wine.
And he gave me bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Now thats a French rhone wine that is one of the nicest wines brands and
I open that bottle I was absolutely stunned by the aromas and the flavors and the complexity.
I guess you could say I was bitten by
the wine bug at that time.
I began to buy wine and collect wine and when I got 6000 bottles my wife said,
"Maybe we should do something different."
So I had been actually dreaming
about owning a vineyard for about 25 years
prior to purchasing the property.
This all begs the question, why get into these businesses?
They're not traditionally what one might consider.
When you're in the middle of
nowhere you got to find things to do.
And so, I got into home brewing.
And since we were Wyoming there wasn't a whole lot of crap here at the time anyway.
Homebrewing  transitions from doing it on my kitchen stove top to how much more can I brew in one sitting?
Because the amount of time taken to
brew one gallon vs 5 gallon vs. 15 or
45 gallons is the same amount of time.
Now it's a habit that blew up so...
Host: today you help thousands of others get the habit.
Ryan: And now today we're helping many more get into the same habit, yes.
At this point I call it a hobby gone wild.
because originally it took over a spare bedroom and then my garage and then part of the downstairs office.
And I said "This is enough, you need to find real commercial space,
and it blossomed from there. It really has.
We've been capturing native strains there wild strains caught in nature.
We try to avoid the term wild,
because people associated it with Brettanomyces
a different brewing strain which produces sour beers. But yeah, everyone's in love with that
because everyone wants to brew all with Michigan right now,
all like all Michigan beers all Michigan locally sourced products or ingredients is really highly desired so that
It's a hot topic right now. Actually Electric Brewing Supply sells our yeast to home brewers.
We have several inquiries a week asking "well do you carry all Michigan products?" We carry Michigan grain Michigan crops and Michigan yeast.
So if you want to brew Michigan beer we can provide you with the products to go.
We have a tasting room, the overlooks the Silicon valley on one side
and the Sinecures mountains on  the other side and very little talk about
local very little of our wine actually
leaves the compound because people buy it
and drink it on the days that it is grown there, it's made there it is bottle there and it's drank there.
I really enjoy the farming side but when
we built the winery the thing that
attracted me about that was actually, I  had this idea
because I was an engineer and understood process control and
I understood six sigma understood all these
technologies that I would fill the winery
full of  technology and control all the critical quality
critical quality process brand
We would make world-class wines. Then I found out the wine making is an art and I'm not an artist.
Wow! so I hired a wine maker, turns out it truly is an art, winemakers palette has so many variables.
It takes a lifetime experience to
actually become a really great winemaker.
well they say that wine is a matter of
flavor and finish and complexity and so
forth and then some people say it's not the same for beer, that beer is matter of opinion.
Would you agree with that?
All: (disagreeing)
Host: I look at the menu up here and I don't think thats the case here.
Beer business is getting so much like the wine business in terms of,
going to beer tastings and the
tasting notes on the beer, the way
that it's being merchandised and sold.
paired with food.
The complexity that they're bringing
beer today versus even five years ago
it's just almost overwhelming.
It could be the same distributor and it could be to though from the same company
but over the course of the year, flavor changes.
Dave: Your dealing with nature. 
Ryan: Right, nature has a whole lot of impact on it.
I mean we get a wet year the grain is different. We get a really dry year the grain is different.
yes, so I think you know it's a matter of individual palette.
So you grew up with beer, then maybe you prefer beer.
If you grew up with wine you might prefer wine. Or maybe you learn to drink the wine.
Emily: Maybe you love both.
fun fact, you know there is a saying in that  but, it takes a lot of beer to a great wine.
You know I did it depends
on the situation
mexican food or chinese or japanese food i'm going to have beer
yeah but if I'm having french food i
would have won
yes it's all a matter of flavor of the
time of day and what you feel like I
wonder reading or not who you're with
oh yeah right well it's all good it's
all good it's always a little bit
sometimes that follow the drinking any
Andy be good it's a social events upon
being a bit brings to drive to go
yeah everybody and thanks for you
part of this community
coming and sharing and height I don't
have a blast right now we're right off
your toast as any
you can do it
I'll just Cheers
