I don’t grow wine grapes, but live among a number of small and medium-sized vineyards and have made wine for many years ,and will provide a few thoughts that hopefully are helpful.
If you are primarily interested in making wine, consider buying frozen or fresh grapes (frozen are easier because they come crushed and stemmed for red, which will save you the initial cost of some gear, and already as (frozen) juice, for white) and experimenting a bit–the amateur winemaker is often able buy grapes as good as s/he can grow. If you passed chemistry in school, you can make wine from frozen grapes that an average person will say they would pay for in a restaurant. If you are considering buying fresh grapes, PM me for some more info.
Making small batches of quality white wine is a bit more difficult than red, as it is hard to prevent oxidation in the processing of small batches and whites are more susceptible to degradation from it. It’s possible, just a bit more work. So, if space permits, maybe consider aiming for more than a couple gallons per year.
If there are deer and other critters in your area, think about a dog :). If wineries near you net their vineyards, be prepared for doing that, too.
This is a great excuse to drink a lot of local wine–hit up the vineyard managers to find out what rootstocks and clones they are using and why, or university extension sources. Try to get a sense of how the wine from different vineyards varies based on aspect, elevation, slope, soil, and how water moves (or not) over the vineyard. If the vineyards plant different grapes in different conditions, it may help guide your choice. If Riesling is grown well locally, I’d encourage you to also consider it (if you like the local Riesling, of course). Small batch wine quality is dominated by the quality of the fruit. It’s a rough analogy, but Riesling is to white grapes what Flavor King is to pluots, i.e., one of the superior pieces of fruit and able of producing interesting wine in varying conditions from year to year.
After selecting variety and rootstock (if needed), there are a few training systems to choose from, but you can read up on those and they likely will not be the limiting factor in quality. Planting density you can get from looking at local vineyards. There has been a trend to increasing planting density over time, so the newer vineyards likely will have higher density than the older ones. There is plenty of information on how much yield you can aim for, what brix to harvest at, etc. and hopefully you have a good source of university extension information in your area to provide local best practices. If you can find a vineyard that is similar to your location (elevation, slope, soil, aspect, and how water moves) definitely try to pick the brain of the person(s) who tends those grapes as for advice. When it’s time to pick in the Fall, it’s often an “all hands on deck” problem for small wineries and they commonly enlist friends and family to help pick and crush. You may be able to get in on this in the Fall and ask some questions.
The winemaking itself is simple and the universities in California and the Pacific Northwest have publications you can download (and presumably some near to you, as well). There also are centuries of books, and online information, too, to help prevent and remedy, any possible problem that might arise (in my experience with West Coast fruit, problems are rare).
tl;dr: Totally doable; find a good source of local information, if you can, to get to the best quality from the start.
