Staking Out Brooklyn Turf for a Winery

The drab ex-factory building on Dobbins Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is an unlikely command post for a bold, one-woman foray into urban winemaking. But that’s where, in a small second-floor office with a single ivy-covered window, ex-engineer Alie Shaper is advancing on her goal of creating a full-scale urban winery in her home borough.It’s grandly called Brooklyn Oenology, and its first releases of white and red wines can already be found at a range of local shops, including Blanc et Rouge in DUMBO and Morrell in Rockefeller Center. In a coup for her fledgling enterprise, Ms. Shaper’s first merlot, vintage 2005, has made it onto the wine list at Gramercy Tavern.A mere 150 cases of that merlot were made, but Ms. Shaper plans to release 500 cases of the 2006 merlot in September, along with another 3,500 cases of chardonnay, Viognier, and several red and white blends. All labels are illustrated with artwork by Brooklyn artists, and can be peeled off for keeping.The city is suddenly in the midst of an unlikely ferment (so to speak) of wine-producing activity. On Varick Street in Manhattan, City Winery is set to open this fall, offering amateur winemakers the opportunity to partner in the creation of a personal barrel of wine, using grapes sourced from America or Chile. In Floral Park, Queens, Queens County Farm is set to release its first “estate grown” merlot this autumn from an acre and a half of vines. Another new vineyard, focused on Sangiovese, the classic Tuscan grape, is being planted at the Staten Island Botanical Garden. And back in Brooklyn, the Tasting Room at Williamsburg’s Bridge Urban Winery sells wines made from its own vineyard in Long Island, with a borough-based, small-scale winery in the works. Another urban winery, as yet unnamed, is now being fitted out in Red Hook — a project of Mark Snyder, a Park Slope-based wine distributor, and a pair of cult Napa Valley winemakers, Abe Schoener and Robert Foley.Ms. Shaper is sourcing her grapes from Long Island’s North Fork and, at least for now, is making her wines there at a so-called “custom crush facility,” essentially a winery for hire. But her aim is to eventually truck just-harvested grapes to her winery in Brooklyn and carry out all the winemaking steps — crushing, pressing, fermentation, and aging — on the premises. “People envision the typical format of a winery to be rolling vineyards and a grand tasting room,” Ms. Shaper said at her office. “But this is a new model that’s part of a developing urban winemaking trail. You see it happening especially in the San Francisco Bay area, where there are now a number of in-town wineries. Their distance from the vineyards in Napa and Sonoma is about the same as ours is from the North Fork.”Growing up on Long Island, Ms. Shaper hardly seemed destined for the wine world. “All I ate was baloney and pickles, and my mom thought I’d only be 3 feet tall,” she said. But as an engineering student in upstate Ithaca, with the Finger Lakes vineyards nearby, she began to develop a taste for wine. This, in turn, “expanded my ways to think about food as well.”After a four-year stint doing “engineering stuff” in Silicon Valley, she returned home in 2000. “I stumbled on an ad for a tasting room person at Rivendell Winery in the Hudson Valley,” she said. “It asked, ‘Do you love wine?’ And I answered, ‘Yes I do.'”Ms. Shaper worked for three years at Rivendell, as well as its SoHo shop and wine bar, Vintage New York. She left in 2003 to work for a wine distributor, and as wine director for a Long Island restaurant group. Her dream was to open her own winery “in around 20 years,” as she recalled.But the timetable accelerated one day in 2005 as she stood on the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn, home to numerous new businesses. “It hit me on the head that this is what Brooklyn is all about now — heavy industry that died, being replaced by new, more artisanal enterprises like coffee roasters, jewelry designers, glass blowers, and sculptors. And I thought, this would be a kick-ass place for a winery. But I didn’t want to wait 20 years. My wine experience at that point wasn’t hands-on, so I decided — now I gotta learn how to make the stuff.”Ms. Shaper was soon working at Premium Wine, the North Fork custom crush facility where she now makes her own wines. “There were days when I had goo and yeasts all over me,” she said. “I do love my city self and being fashionable, but I love my work boots and fleece and getting dirty, too.”For her own first release, she bought fermented but unfinished wines, which she blended and finished. Owning no vineyard of her own, she keeps an eye out for growers who have grapes to sell. Last year, for example, while working at Premium, she overheard a grower say that his buyer for several tons of Viognier grapes had reneged. “I ran over to him and said, ‘Oh, me, me, me,’ she recalled. Six hundred cases of that aromatic Viognier are about to be released by Brooklyn Oenology. “Long Island is terrific for aromatic whites,” she said.Ms. Shaper says that the creation of her Brooklyn winery, where freshly picked grapes can be delivered, is still years away. When that finally does happen, an as yet unfamiliar but lively scent will hang in the urban air of Brooklyn: juice being fermented into wine. It’s a hard smell to describe. To Alie Shaper, though, it will simply be “the smell of what I do.”RECOMMENDED BROOKLYN OENOLOGY WINESMerlot, 2005 ($18.95 at Morrell’s, morrellwine.com) — No California-style fat here. Just lean and focused fruit that will perfectly partner a roast chicken.Chardonnay, 2005 ($19.99 at Vintage New York, vintagenewyork.com) — Has the aromatics and taste of a lighter white Burgundy, with citrus and cinnamon notes. An ideal sipper at deck time.

Staking Out Brooklyn Turf for a Winery

Staking Out Brooklyn Turf for a Winery

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