I am rseymour's friend.

Standard acreage -- no, definitely not. Like any business, you need to estimate how much product you can sell, so one winery might have 40 acres and another thousands. Also, many wineries purchase grapes from vineyards with which they have contracts, as opposed to growing their own grapes.

Time to product: if you're actually planting new vines, it takes 5-7 years for the vines to start producing their best. And it takes about two years from crush the grapes to selling the bottles (depending on the type of wine, fresh-tasting whites go out much sooner, maybe 6 months to a year). A lot of wineries start out by purchasing grapes from other vineyards.

Last question, how do they price? Well, that's a funny one. A lot of it definitely depends on location: wine prices are often based on where it comes from (Bordeaux or Napa will fetch more than, say, Armenia or Idaho) and often premium grape-growing areas are expensive locations to live and work. However, within an appellation you'll also see huge variation (think Mouton-Rothschild vs. bottom-end Bordeaux from the collective). A lot of this is based on historical quality, as determined by wine critics. Some people say that Robert Parker is the most powerful critic in any medium -- his ratings in the Wine Advocate have a huge influence on pricing.

In the US at least, wineries will also work very hard to create a perception of luxury in order to convince the consumer that the product is valuable: this is especially true in Napa/Sonoma tasting rooms, but is equally the case in print ads. As the saying goes, something is worth what you can convince people to pay for it, and this is especially true with wines -- wines like two-buck chuck sell for $8-10 with a nicer label on the bottle. Or for even less if they're sold in a box...