Crush Time in the City

Dec. 28, 2007 — -- Amid the drilling and hammering of ongoing construction, the new urban home of Bridge Vineyards emerges from the dust — a wine-tasting bar on one side, redbrick walls, the proverbial barrels.

Within the next few weeks, this New York winery moves its tasting room and sales — and eventually its winemaking — from the pastoral lanes of Long Island's North Fork to an edgily chic stretch of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where old machine shops and graffiti meld with a Pilates studio and a smattering of storefront galleries.

There's not a rolling hill or trellised vine in sight.

That its new location is 85 miles from the 20-acre vineyard that provides the grapes for its "handcrafted" merlots, chardonnays and cabernet sauvignons matters little, says co-owner Greg Sandor.

"To truck grapes into Brooklyn is nothing," he says. "I could be picking grapes at 5 a.m. and have them into Brooklyn at 8 p.m. that night. And we could crush all night if we needed to."

What's more important is that Bridge's new urban home, tucked into the ground floor and cellar of a luxury condo building, is within subway — or elevator — reach of customers.

With the move, Sandor and co-owner Paul Wegimont become part of a fledgling but growing urban winery experiment, a trend that first took hold around San Francisco's East Bay. It has since edged its way into other parts of California — including Sacramento, Santa Barbara and San Diego — and to such cities as Seattle, Portland, Ore., Denver, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Raleigh, N.C.

"In some ways it's an outgrowth on a commercial scale of winemaking that goes back to Prohibition days, when a lot of people made wine in cities with purchased fruit," says Paul Lukacs, author of "American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine" and "The Great Wines of America." "It also reflects the increased American interest in wine."