Dan Sullivan was a lot like many newbie winemakers when he started his labels Domaine Paradox and Daniel Joseph in 2006. Sullivan and his wife Olivia owned a southern Oregon vineyard, but absent their own winery and the expertise to make wine, they turned to what’s known as custom crush.

Basically the term means paying someone else, usually an existing winery, to make the wine. The Sullivans would take over the marketing and distribution once the wine was bottled. Custom crush clients might range from boutique wineries producing a few hundred cases like the Sullivans to more than 100,000 cases per year.

After a few years, two wineries the Sullivans had contracted with expanded their own labels and lost the space for custom crush. Sullivan approached a winemaker he worked with before, Linda Donovan, with an idea for a sole custom crush facility for wine entrepreneurs just like him.

The idea came to fruition, so to speak, in a partnership between the Sullivans and Donovan called Pallet Wine Co. They’re still in the process of converting a 21,000-square-foot historic warehouse in Medford into a winery with capacity to produce, by this year’s harvest in September, up to 25,000 cases per year. To put the endeavor in perspective, Sullivan’s own label produces just 200 cases per year.