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.