DIY WINE IN NEW YORK CITY

Where oh where can the urban oenophile go to produce wine? To SoHo, naturally, where City Winery has just opened to fill this wine-making gap. Molly Young tries her hand at making a Syrah ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

The City Winery is without the usual trappings of a vineyard. There are no rolling hills, no ripening, trellised grapes, no melting sunlight. Instead, it stands on an industrious thoroughfare at the far edge of SoHo, in an area perpetually under construction and clogged with taxis. Four lanes of traffic move toward the Holland Tunnel. Ten-storey buildings line both sides of the street. Welcome to Manhattan's wine country--easily accessible by car, subway or bus.

I visited City Winery on a cool, grey October morning, eight weeks before it's grand January opening. Construction teams still pounded away, the corner of the city a locus of activity. The windows of 143 Varick were papered over, begging passersby to peer inside. But not much was visible except for a row of light fixtures the colour of sultanas in a space painted a deep cranberry-brown. A poster affixed to the central window showed a subway station filled to the brim with grapes. "It's crush hour in New York," it reads.

Michael Dorf, an impresario who founded the Knitting Factory, an important downtown music venue, came up with the idea for City Winery. A wine-lover, Dorf saw the appeal in granting urban oenophiles the chance to make their own wine (perhaps with musicians performing nearby). The average person faces three big hurdles if they want to produce something drinkable: expertise (years of training are needed to produce a decent glass); expensive equipment (necessary for even the simplest wine production); and grapes (a good grape is hard to find, and even harder to grow). For a pretty penny ($7,000 at minimum), Dorf provides these necessary ingredients, and customers can participate in each step of the process: crushing, pressing, fermenting, barrel-tasting, bottling and labelling.

City Winery sources grapes from top vineyards in California, Oregon, Argentina and Chile. A bottle of wine from one of these spots could run around $75; the cost of a custom-made bottle boils down to $30. It's not a bad deal, if you don't mind unpredictability and getting your hands dirty. David Lecomte, a master winemaker from France's Rhone Valley, is on hand to walk participants through the process.

But really, the customers don't make the wine. City Winery operates like any other winery--except it allows those with funds to produce their own vintage. Because of its unique location, Dorf to calls it the first “fully operational urban winery” in existence.

Entering the winery is like stepping into a greenhouse. The outside world recedes; quiet productivity reigns. There is a sense of magical things taking place under strict control. With barely one foot in the door, I'm hit with the delicious smell of baking bread--yeast fermentation, actually--topped with the perfume of crushed fruit. There are hoses coiled on the floor and enormous steel tanks with digital displays. It is easy to see how someone could fall in love with such a place, particularly when there's a personal stake in the proceedings. This is where the sensual mixes with the futuristic.

During my visit, I got to spend a day pretending to be a barrel-owner overseeing the progress of my own wine. First I met Lecomte, the master winemaker. With ginger-hair and a voice like a bassoon, he had the build of someone who might slaughter a lamb with finesse. He was previously a winemaker at Herzog Wine Cellars in California and has a Master's degree in enology and winemaking from the University of Montpellier. He was busily overseeing the activity of several assistants buzzing around a tank of grapes from Northern California. For someone working at the very height of a chi-chi industry, he acts nothing like the snobbish wine connoisseur I had anticipated I would meet.

The plan was for me to make a Syrah. One of the assistants--another brawny fellow with a French accent--stood beside the tank using a white shovel to sweep grapes into a basin. From the basin the grapes moved up a conveyor belt and dropped down into a second vat. The assistant's shovel was stained a colour that recalled lipstick shades favoured by teenage girls.

Loose grapes escaped the conveyor belt and skittered across the floor; it was impossible to walk a few steps without squashing one underfoot. Puddles of wine gathered. (How odd to see this precious liquid left for the mop!) While Lecomte went outside to check on a delivery, one of the assistants beckoned me over.

Inside the tank the grapes had been fermenting for two weeks with the help of yeast, which turns sugar to alcohol. A sign posted on the tank had the varietal of the grape and the date of the crush written in black marker. "We're squeezing every last bit of juice out," said the assistant. A noise suddenly came from within the tank--"Oy!" Through a porthole I saw a pair of black rubber boots standing atop the mound of crushed fruit. A second assistant shovelled from within. The grapes, wrinkled and de-stemmed, were the size of blueberries.

"How'd you like a taste of the wine?" the assistant asked, grabbing a clean glass and stooping beside a second tank. Lecomte reappeared and joined us for the taste. The assistant unscrewed a spigot and held the glass beneath. Wine squirted forth, overshooting the glass and splashing my boots. "BOOM!" said Lecomte as I leapt to avoid the purple fountain. He used the phrase often, as a sort of punctuation.

The new wine was very purple, with a crown of magenta froth. It is what my Syrah will taste like after three weeks. A sip was like being punched in the mouth with a wine-covered fist. All of the notes usually present in a slug of wine--sweet, tart, warm, bitter--ran rampant. They were forces, not flavours. The wine hadn't taken form yet. I ventured a second sip. BOOM! Another sock in the kisser. I believe my eyes bulged. Lecomte, watching me, smiled. The odour of the wine alone was dizzying. Down it went, pickling my tongue along the way.

Lecomte took the glass from my hands and gesticulated with it, pointing to the tank being emptied of grapes. A man's head popped out the top. After exchanging a few hand signals with Lecomte, he emerged from within using a ladder. A giant fan switched to "OFF" and the atmosphere was suddenly quiet. Lecomte then explained the dangers of working inside the fermentation tanks, which collect carbon dioxide and can cause a person to lose consciousness. "Every year people die," he said, swishing the glass of wine. "They'll go in to get something they dropped, like a hammer, and without a fan or a person supervising, BOOM! Out they go." What a way to die, glug-glugged forever in a vat of Syrah.

Lecomte finally took a swig from the glass, and then spit an arc of wine into a nearby receptacle. (Was I supposed to spit out the wine too?) While we talked, his hand ruffled through a mountain of grapes. His hands seemed permanently stained purple to the wrist. At one point he plucked a grape from the pile and popped it into his mouth, then offered one to me. "It's full of wine," he said. Unlike the other desiccated grapes in the vat, the grape he offered me was glossy and fat with juice. I ate it. The skin burst and a mouthful of wine drained from the fruit, like magic.

"There are people who've been in the wine business their whole lives and have never done this," said Lecomte. And with the taste of a fermented grape in my mouth, I got it. The transformation of fruit to wine remains thrilling with each repetition, because each time is different. Every season, every harvest, pure alchemy. Who wouldn’t pay for that?

At the end of the tour was the cellar where the wine will age. The oak barrels were lovely, built with a gentle pregnant slope, sitting snugly in racks designed to absorb the shocks of a nearby subway station. Each one had an empty plaque ready to be embossed with its owner's name. Here the wine will develop for six to 12 months, during which time customers can pop by and check on their wine, even taste it. There is a separate room for kosher wines overseen by a Rabbi.

When my day at the winery was over I headed out to look for a place to sit and collect my thoughts. There was a lunchroom nearby, an anonymous corporate café with smoothies and sandwiches for sale. Inside the cafeteria was a giant wooden lion, sculpted mid-roar. In the shadow of that weirdly discordant feline, and with the taste of the wine-filled grape still on my tongue, I felt a real gratitude for New York, where pockets of strangeness still to flourish in the wilds of this fair city.

Picture Credit: City Winery

(Molly Young is a writer living in New York. Her last article for More Intelligent Life was "I am in love with a sociopath".)