Urban wineries take root in settings more practical than palatial

EMERYVILLE, Calif. - Forget wine chateaux shimmering under the Napa sun. A new wave of vintners is choosing city life over the green hectares of wine country, setting up shop in warehouses, business parks and other locales that offer more grit than glamour.

The idea is to bring wines closer to their key demographic - well-heeled city-dwellers - and take advantage of lower overhead costs and a better infrastructure than can be found in the small and expensive towns that make up established wine country.

"Grapes care a lot about where they're grown. They don't care at all where they're made into wine," points out Brendan Eliason, owner and winemaker at Periscope Cellars, housed in an old Second World War submarine repair facility on the shores of the San Francisco Bay that is also home to another winery, Urbano Cellars.

It's hard to say exactly how many city wineries exist, but there are clusters to be found from Seattle to New York. In the San Francisco Bay area alone more than a dozen operate inside San Francisco city limits and more than 20 in the east bay area.

Even in wine country, some are moving to digs that are more practical than palatial.

"I'd say there's a definite trend," says Pat Roney, principal owner of Girard winery, which has a tasting room in the picturesque wine country town of Yountville, but moved its winemaking facilities into a business park in Sonoma three years ago. "It's a lot more cost-effective and if you want to sell your wines at prices that are reasonable and affordable for consumers, you can't afford a lot of the trappings of the estate wineries."

No one's singing a requiem for wine country just yet.

At the Napa Valley Vintners, spokesman Terry Hall contends there is value in being close to the grape source. For one thing, the winemaker/owner can monitor the fruit every day. He agrees you don't need a chateau to make wine, but says not many people in the valley do so since a lot of the wineries are small, family-owned businesses.

Robert Smiley, director of wine industry programs at the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management, sees the urban wineries as a "small niche," but one that's been growing.

With the economy in a tailspin, it's harder to get the kind of credit needed to invest in wine country's still very expensive real estate. Meanwhile, city warehouse space is suddenly opening up at low, low rates.

"This is a low-cost way to get into the business," says Smiley.

Periscope's Eliason worked in wine country for years. And never even considered trying to build his own Tuscan-style villa there.

"That's one of the big differences between winemakers and winery owners," he says with a laugh. "If you actually make the wine, those places look not only vaguely grotesque but just bizarre. They bear no resemblance to the actual winemaking process."

He had three criteria when scouting his winery location: good electricity, good water supply and a good back story, and found all three in Emeryville.

"I'm not here by accident," says Eliason. "I really love the East Bay. I really wanted to have a winery here. I really wanted to tie it in with the history of my community and the history of my neighbourhood."

It's about a three-hour drive to all the state's prime growing regions, which means grapes arrive fresh. And working in a space designed for heavy industry means never being pressed for space. "I can back two 40-foot container trucks side by side at my back door," he says with quiet pride.