As the morning fog begins to burn off, winemaker Tracey Brandt punches her forklift under a large plastic container filled with syrah grapes, hauled in the day before from the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada. She moves the grapes over to a stainless-steel chute, where volunteers pick spiders and debris from the small, intensely blue-purple fruit before sliding the bunches down into the destemming machinery.

The area surrounding the winery isn’t made up of the acres of cool, misty vineyards or gently rolling hills you might expect to find. Instead, A Donkey and Goat Winery, which specializes in sustainable winemaking, is situated in a flat expanse of weathered red-brick warehouses and sleek modern lofts in Berkeley, California. Among its neighbors are a Chinese herbal-medicine company, an organic-sauerkraut producer, a children’s clothing maker, and a manufacturer of custom-molded rubber products.

Welcome to urban winemaking, a burgeoning national movement of young, citified entrepreneurs who have been bitten by the wine bug but are choosing to make wine where they live. Urban wineries once thrived in major cities like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles until Prohibition shut them down. But now they’re popping up all over the country again, in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon—metropolitan areas that are within driving distance of well-known grape-growing regions (see Urban Wineries Across America).

The San Francisco Bay Area is the most advanced region for urban winemaking in the nation, with at least 17 wineries, and more opening every month (see Bottles Around the Bay).

In New York, Bridge Vineyards will open the first commercial urban winery in the area since Prohibition. Bridge will launch its operations in late October, in Brooklyn’s hip Williamsburg neighborhood. (Another company, City Winery, plans to open a custom winemaking facility in Manhattan soon afterward.) Bridge plans to blend and bottle wines it ferments at its five-year-old winery on Long Island into a Brooklyn red and white and, next year, to ferment wine on the premises. “We see ourselves as bringing what’s on Long Island right here to Williamsburg, which is only 60 miles away from the vineyards and only a two-minute train ride from Manhattan,” says Bridge co-owner Paul Wegimont.

These wineries aren’t producing plonk, either. They often source grapes from some of the finest vineyards and regularly earn 90-plus scores from popular raters, including Robert Parker and Wine Spectator.

In the 1970s and ’80s, aspiring winemakers went back to the land, but people who aren’t multimillionaires have been priced out of the market for prime grape-growing acreage in California. With startup costs at urban wineries running under a few hundred thousand dollars, making wine right in town has begun to look quite attractive.

A Donkey and Goat owners Brandt and her husband, Jared, are typical of the newer winemakers who populate the Bay Area’s light-industrial areas. The thirtysomethings started their winery in 2004 after the dotcom bust in San Francisco ended their lucrative careers at J.P. Morgan (before it merged with Chase) and Eastman Kodak. The wine neophytes picked up and moved to near Lyon, France, to work for a year with respected winemaker and negotiant Éric Texier, whose wines are made from grapes he sources from around France’s Rhône Valley. The Brandts returned to San Francisco and helped start Crushpad, a custom-winemaking facility, before going out on their own.

“There’s been a democratization of the winemaking field in the last five to 10 years—and a breaking down of the barriers,” Tracey says. “People have come to realize that you don’t necessarily have to have $10 million and a Napa château to start making wine.”

Most of these garagistes, as small-scale winemakers are often referred to in the trade, operate on a shoestring, many holding down day jobs. They sell their wines through word of mouth, a strategy made much easier by the internet. But it’s a business that can be difficult to scale: Few make more than 2,500 cases per year, a drop in the barrel compared with the half-million or more cases made by the biggest wineries. Distribution is tough, revenues rarely top $1 million, and profits often don’t arrive for many years, if ever. (Urban upstarts often cover the lean years with so-called custom-crush deals with winemakers who are just a little younger and want to make wine while setting up their own facilities.) And to source good grapes, they must develop relationships with growers, though that has been made easier in the last few years by the glut of fruit that has flooded the market as a result of overplanting in parts of California.

Urban winemakers are also being helped by a cultural shift: The wine-drinking demographic is growing younger. Wine drinkers aged 21 to 28 are driving much of the growth in the consumption of the beverage, which has eclipsed beer as America’s favorite alcoholic drink, according to a 2006 report from the Wine Market Council. “The younger generation has been reading from Robert Parker about garagistes making wine out of their garages in France all these years, and it sounds like fun to them,” says Mike Dashe, owner of Dashe Cellars, which, at 11 years old, is a relative old-timer on the scene. Dashe Cellars is located near Oakland’s formerly all-industrial Jack London Square neighborhood.
 
The benefits for urban winemakers is that they get to make wine while retaining their citybound sensibilities. “I like the fact that I can ride my bike to the winery in five minutes and stop on the way to get a double espresso and a sandwich at Café Fanny [a little sister to Chez Panisse], and then go to Monterey Market on the way home and choose from a number of good shops like Kermit Lynch for a bottle of wine,” says urban wine pioneer Steve Edmunds, whose well-respected Edmunds St. John winery opened in 1985 and is now located down the street from A Donkey and Goat. “Although I love the stillness and solitude out in the country, I get a little stir-crazy after a while.”