A husband and wife find satisfaction, and opportunity, in the world of make-your-own wine
By: Lauren Otis
Just off Route 130 in Dayton, at the rear of a nondescript office and retail complex, a sign indicates the entrance to The Grape Escape. Going through the modest entry door, a high, long hangar-like space unexpectedly opens up before you. Racks of oak barrels line the wine-red walls, comfortable stuffed chairs sit in one corner and stainless steel tanks perch in another. On one side several men and women are gaily placing bottles of wine in cardboard cases and taking them through a large side door swung open to the late afternoon sun. Across the room two women and their children sit at several high tables and enjoy a picnic, the women sipping from glasses of wine. A forklift plies the huge central open space. Through all this activity Tom Nye crosses the room and introduces himself.
Mr. Nye, 39, and his wife Nancy, 38, founded, own and operate the Grape Escape, which provides equipment, expertise, and most important, quality grapes, for those who wish to make, age and bottle their own wine. Mr. Nye, a gregarious man casually dressed in jeans and a Grape Escape polo shirt, is constantly bouncing up from his seat to attend to one thing or another or greet new arrivals. "We are just exploding here," he says happily.
In the classic tale of corporate refugees, the idea for the Grape Escape germinated in the minds of Mr. and Ms. Nye in an environment of "constant corporate downsizing," according to Mr. Nye, who still maintains his day job as IT Director at US&L International in Matawan. Ms. Nye was formerly chief financial officer at Sensors Unlimited Inc. in West Windsor.
"That is what kicked off this thing five years ago," Mr. Nye says. "I was talking to my wife and I said lets do something we love. We love to entertain and we love wine." Out of that thought of jettisoning the corporate world before the corporate world jettisoned them, the Grape Escape was born two and a half years ago.
"We did look at opening a vineyard, that was the first idea," Mr. Nye says. But the Nyes weren’t sure they could grow grapes of the quality they desired, and "in retrospect that would have required me to spend hours and hours on a tractor, and not interacting with people."
Once they settled on starting a make-your-own wine business, Mr. Nye who "had played around with winemaking on my own" spent a year learning the trade working for free for Lou Sedano’s Tintin Falls-based make it yourself operation, the Wine Experience. "I consider him my mentor," Mr. Nye says.
Mr. Sedano "emphasized the art aspect of making wine" in the old Italian style, Mr. Nye says. Grape Escape has wedded this notion of winemaking as an art and applied it "to the science aspect of making wine," he says.
Starting with premium varietal grapes which are shipped twice a year from famous regions of the world the Napa Valley, Sonoma County, and the Sierra foothills in California, as well as Chile and Argentina Grape Escape employs advanced sanitation and winemaking techniques rarely seen outside of commercial wineries, Mr. Nye says. He cites his operation’s use of nitrogen in bottling as well as its use of an ozone machine for sanitizing barrels and other equipment.
Over several sessions, customers will de-stem and crush the grapes of their choice, press the juice out of the must after fermentation, and choose from a variety of oak barrel types to fill with their wine. After aging in oak and racking the wine, it is bottled and personalized labels can be affixed.
From the customer’s standpoint this results in not just their ability to build their own wine from start to finish at a reasonable price of between $10 and $15 a bottle, but to create a premium wine doing it, according to Mr. Nye. "Our view is try and find a better bottle for $20, and I didn’t come up with that slogan, my customers did," he says.
The Nyes, who live in Manalapan, both had worked in the greater Princeton area and felt it was ripe for a high-end operation like they envisioned, because area residents were in general sophisticated and discerning consumers of wine.
Using their backgrounds they brought additional improvements to their business, Ms. Nye from the financial management side, and Mr. Nye in designing a computer database that enabled them to sell and track eighths of a barrel rather than half or full barrels offered by others. A full barrel will fill 240 bottles of wine, and by offering consumers the ability to make only an eighth of a barrel, less of a commitment is needed and more people will opt to try the winemaking experience, Mr. Nye says.
"What we wanted to do was offer people an option to at least try it. We felt it was a better way to include more people," Mr. Nye adds. Inevitably, people have fun and bring their friends back, and participation just snowballs, he says.
"What we’ve tried to do is take the intimidation factor out of this, this is fun. We’ve tried to bring, Nancy and myself, our personal touch of fun to the business," Mr. Nye says. "It is a given that the wine will be quality. We concentrate on the people, we concentrate on relationships, concentrate on the customers."
The concept has been to take the fun atmosphere of entertaining in their living room and translate it into the winemaking business, says Mr. Nye, and as the large loft-like space around him fills up with expectant customers, it isn’t hard to see that he and Ms. Nye have succeeded.
Mr. Nye says his customers range from beginners to experienced winemakers, from millionaires who drop in from out of state, to locals of more modest means. "Our customers range from age 21 to 75. You know it is amazing, I don’t even think we have a sweet spot, it is that wide. Everybody loves wine," he says.
As with many startups, Grape Escape’s first year was "a real challenge," according to Mr. Nye. Needing a warehousing license from the New Jersey Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, Mr. Nye recalls having shipments of grapes from California due to arrive that first year but no license. "We had to open by a certain time or we were done," he says.
But everyone from local authorities to the state pitched in and ultimately their doors were open on time, Mr. Nye says. "New Jersey is a hard place to start a small business in but everybody helped," he says.
Then calamity hit.
"Ten days in business, a truckful of our grapes crashed in Indiana, spilling our grapes all over," Mr. Nye says.
"We were able to scrounge up another order," he says, adding "it worked out in the end, the grapes we got were good." Even so, the whole experience "was scary," he says.
But that difficult first year also had its good points. "The first year we grew so much it was ridiculous, we had 150 percent growth that year," Mr. Nye says. And Grape Escape continues to grow, if not quite as precipitously.
"This is only getting better every single year. This year is going to be a breakthrough in quality for us," Mr. Nye says. He has lined up the vineyards he wants to supply his grapes, and operations are in place and running smoothly.
In its 2007 vintage, Grape Escape will ultimately produce 36,000 bottles, and Mr. Nye hopes to double that production over time. Grape Escape is now the largest producer of Chilean wine in the United States, he says. Based on positive word of mouth advertising, and Internet marketing, as the current crop of wine is dispersed to customers’ friends and family "within two years we will explode," said Mr. Nye.
The make-it-yourself wine business itself "is exploding all over the U.S.," he says, and New Jersey is no different, with 24 such businesses up and running throughout the state.
For the Nye’s the future looks bright. They are always looking for ways to improve the operation, are currently seeking quality sources for grapes from other regions of the world, such as Spain and Australia, and are mulling over expansion, even franchising opportunities, according to Mr. Nye.
Operating Grape Escape has been a rewarding experience, from seeing customers become friends to introducing people to lesser known varietal grapes like Barbera and Sangiovese, according to Mr. Nye. "We do blends here you can’t buy in the store," he says.
"One of the things we’ve done is hired help for the first time," he says. "At some point my customers want to talk to me, they don’t want to see me running around," he adds.
"The aspect of this I probably did not anticipate was the sales aspect. I didn’t think about sales. That has been really satisfying," Mr. Nye says. "All my life I’ve had friends and family tell me I should be in sales, and now I am 100 percent. It’s amazing."
It has been good to prove everyone wrong from family, to their landlord, to grape distributors who thought they were crazy, Mr. Nye says.
"We are at a point because of our growth that we both need to do this full time. We are at a tipping point. There are so many more things we can do," he says.
Unfortunately, one of them isn’t entertaining with wine and friends in their living room anymore. With the success of the Grape Escape, their new "living room," they just don’t have the time right now, Mr. Nye acknowledges.
The Grape Escape is located at 12 Stults Road in Dayton. Information on the company and their winemaking sessions is available at www.gograpes.com. "Labors of Love" is an occasional series profiling area businesses operated by people as much out of love for what they do as for any profit motive.

