Brooklyn Winery — which relocated to 61 Guernsey St. in February and opened an adjoining new restaurant, Rosette — is now hosting winery tours and tastings every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
For $45 a person, the winery’s winemaking team will lead guests through the winery, production space, and barrel room, and educate them on everything from harvesting and sourcing grapes to fermenting and bottling.
And in case you didn’t notice, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill sprawling, bachelorette-party-boomerang-posting outdoor vineyard, so the tour will also include an exclusive peek into the challenges for producing wine in a metropolitan area.
“Initially, when we started Brooklyn Winery back in 2010, our founders went to this like sort of team-building winemaking class that took place in New Jersey,” winemaker Chuck Gergley explained. “And they lived in Brooklyn at the time, so they were like, ‘How come this doesn’t exist in Brooklyn?’ So they took the plunge after that and ended up opening Brooklyn Winery.”
And for Gergley, who met executive director Conor McCormack back in California and became the first winemaker they brought on (and has now been with Brooklyn Winery for about 12 years), the ability to return to doing what he loved without having to leave New York is part of the beauty of it.
“It’s fun and inviting and, not to bash the wine or sommelier world or anything like that, it’s great, but it can be exclusive and it’s not something a lot of people run to because of that,” Gergley admitted. “So we’re working to make it more inclusive, approachable. To have the people from our community come be part of it is very cool.”
Plus, given how tumultuous harvesting seasons can be (not least thanks to climate change) — and grapes are no exception — guests will actually have a front-row seat to the processing and very beginnings of the production when they’re getting grapes in. Which, in turn, influences which wines will be made (and, ultimately, tasted).
“If we get good fruit, it makes my job a lot easier. We’re not beholden to any one vineyard. And you know, we’re certainly at the mercy of Mother Nature here, but we get to choose from the best vineyards like all over the country; some great growers out in California, the Finger Lakes, North Fork, all over,” Gergley said. “So it’s like we get to kinda have the best of both worlds in a way. And we’re based out of the city. For me, on a personal level, the coolest thing is that I get to essentially have like an agriculture job.”
And, of course, it will include tasting wine — five of them, to be exact, all produced at the winery.
“One of the cool things about moving to this newer facility, while the production space itself is a little bit smaller than the old one, that’ll allow me to work with smaller-lot wines, which is what I wanna do anyway. It allows me to have a little more fun with it so I can keep the wine list fresh,” Gergley said of their wine list development (and he’s partial to orange wine).
Buy tickets to your own tour and tasting here.