{"id":5102,"date":"2018-12-15T22:22:54","date_gmt":"2018-12-15T22:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maderatribustg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=5102"},"modified":"2026-05-13T18:30:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T18:30:07","slug":"winery-amid-latest-growth-spurt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/winery-amid-latest-growth-spurt\/","title":{"rendered":"Winery amid latest growth spurt"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

On April 14, 1984, Quady Winery officially broke ground on phase one of its new facility designed by San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz and vintner Andrew Quady.<\/p>

According to the Madera Tribune, the new building would allow the family winery to bottle its wines year-round, instead of only in winter and spring, thus tripling output. But it was just the first of several phases planned, and the design of Quady and Saitowitz wouldn\u2019t be fully realized until 1998.<\/p>

Now the winery is more than halfway through a new series of expansions that may be complete as early as 2021.<\/p>

\u201cWe\u2019re in year three of a five-year expansion project where we\u2019re growing the winery from roughly 70,000 cases to 160,000 cases\u201d of annual production, said Doug Dennis, controller of the winery.<\/p>

\u201cWe were about 110 (thousand) last year,\u201d explained marketing manager Colin Hough. \u201cWe did about 130 (thousand) this year.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAnd even more next year,\u201d predicted winemaker Darin Peterson, who said 85-90 percent of the grapes used in the wines are Madera grown, though some grapes come from as far away as Manteca.<\/p>

\u201cObviously Darin has his work cut out for him making the wine, finding the grapes, and maintaining the rigorous standards that we have,\u201d said Hough about the rapid growth. \u201cAnd that\u2019s of utmost importance to us.\u201d<\/p>

This year, the winery finished building a 22,000-square-foot warehouse. Rather than emphasize \u201cvisual impact\u201d as with the winery\u2019s earliest expansion, the trend now is using technology \u201cto make a huge impact on how productive the business is,\u201d Dennis said.<\/p>

To beat the heat, the new warehouse is covered in 500 white panels that are each four inches thick, and beside it sits a \u201cheat exchanger\u201d with about 28 times the cooling capacity of a typical home air conditioner, as estimated by the U.S. Department of Energy.<\/p>

Part of the warehouse holds 350,000 gallons of moscato wine in towering metal tanks, and is cold enough to develop indoor fog on rainy days. \u201cYou could not see the ceiling it was that foggy,\u201d said Dennis. \u201cI\u2019m not exaggerating.\u201d<\/p>

The tanks are individually temperature controlled.<\/p>

\u201cThe whole goal is to keep stuff stable, chilled and under control\u201d for slow fermentation, said Peterson. \u201cThe consequence of that is this whole thing draws down\u201d temperatures inside and outside the tanks, \u201cand eventually the chilling power of the (ammonia) glycol (cooling) system will keep the rest of the building cool as well.\u201d<\/p>

The winery may add three more wine tanks in the next few years, resulting in about 360,000 more gallons in capacity.<\/p>

\u201cThe (180,000 gallon) tank we\u2019re putting outside is basically 32 feet in diameter by 35 feet tall,\u201d said Dennis. \u201cIt will dwarf these\u201d indoor tanks. \u201cAs soon as the weather breaks and we get a few dry days, we\u2019ll start on the foundation. It will probably be serviceable in a March-April time frame.\u201d<\/p>

Not yet finished, the warehouse will eventually feature five offices, a laboratory, a cafe-like break room, a conference room, restrooms, and an observation deck.<\/p>

The Quady family has tried to make its latest expansions \u201cgreen,\u201d according to Dennis. The LED lighting of the warehouse only consumes about 500 watts, he said, and office area sensors will adjust light intensity based on \u201cwhether someone is in the room, how bright it is outside,\u201d etc. Photovoltaic solar cells able to generate 300 kilovolts sit on winery buildings to help power the facilities. In the future, a Tesla Powerwall to store energy may be added, which would allow the winery to be more electrically self-sufficient.<\/p>

All the recent expansions are, of course, not without cost.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s a pretty big, seven-digit investment,\u201d Dennis said. \u201cI think this building, when it\u2019s completed with the tanks, will be $3.5\u201d to $4 billion.<\/p>

Dennis said they\u2019re looking forward to putting the current expansions behind them and enjoying the benefits.<\/p>

\u201cA project of this scope is not for the faint of heart … It\u2019s a dance that you really have to do,\u201d he said, \u201cand it has to be well orchestrated and coordinated, especially to do it in a timely fashion as we\u2019re finding out three years into the expansion project.\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 14, 1984, Quady Winery officially broke ground on phase one of its new facility designed by San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz and vintner Andrew Quady. According to the Madera Tribune, the new building would allow the family winery to bottle its wines year-round, instead of only in winter and spring, thus tripling output. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":41455,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_theme","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_angie_page":false,"page_builder":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[25,26,38,52],"class_list":["post-5102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-agriculture","tag-business","tag-food","tag-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}