By Ceylan Yeginsu
As I turned the corner from Bedford Avenue onto North 8th Street and glimpsed the giant chalk sign that read ‘Brooklyn Winery,’ I started to picture plush ripe grapes and giant wooden barrels of crimson wine. What I didn’t imagine was what it takes to get from the former to the latter. I went to make wine, only to discover I would not have anything to drink for a year.
Once inside, I found myself in converted loft space, furnished with antiques and hand embroidered wallpaper, with three other would-be winemakers and the co-owner of Brooklyn Winery, Brian Leventhal, an animated man in his early 30’s. Stacks of California’s finest Sonoma grapes were lined up against the rustic wooden wall.
Wine, I began to realize, takes time and effort. We would have to plunge our hands into the process. “It takes time, but you end up producing the best wine because it is yours,” Leventhal said. He talked about his vision for his new business, his hopes that people of all sorts, from hipsters to Hasidism, wine novices to connoisseurs, would select, crush, press, rack, bottle and label their wines. My group would be the first.
Levanthal and his business partner, John Stires, each quit their jobs in New Jersey just 14 months ago. The idea of opening their own winery came to them during the long hours they spent making wine at a local winery during the weekends.
My group of novice winemakers was led into a large sanitized room at the back of the facility. Connor McCormack, Brooklyn Winery’s technical expert, greeted us on a forklift that carried stack upon stack of the Russian River grapes that were to be the core ingredient of our own Pinot Noir concoction.
McCormack offered us each a bunch of grapes to try. To me they seemed perfect — the juicy sweet taste accompanied by the crunch of the seed. Yet McCormack said the grapes were anything but perfect for wine. The first step would be to carefully inspect and de-stem before they could be crushed for fermentation.
We took each bunch out of the stacks and tentatively looked for impurities, mold and defects. Then we started to de-stem them. We quickly gained confidence. In ten minutes the group members went from eyeballing one another, unsure and confused, to rapidly working up a pile of good grapes ready to go into the crushing dispenser, a huge intimidating piece of machinery nearby. Discarded grapes splashed under our feet.
The dispenser, which McCormack started up, soon interrupted the silence that had prevailed as we concentrated on the grapes. We climbed to the top of the 10-foot machine, ready but somewhat anxious.
“So we just throw them in? How? Like this? What does it do?” we asked one another. “Just throw them in and you will see,” McCormack said. We hurled the grapes in, ‘ooohing’ and ‘aahing’ as the machine gently crushed them one by one into the gigantic tank, their skins eventually forming a thin layer on top of the purple water.
The crushed grapes were left to stand for a couple of hours to breath and allow all the skins to come to the top. Later, yeast would be added to start the fermentation process.
The formula for the fermentations process is: The yeast, added to the grapes converts the natural sugars contained in the grapes (glucose and fructose) into ethanol and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is then released from the wine mixture into the air and the alcohol remains. Once the yeast is added to our grapes we would wait a week until we would visit our brew again.
We walked into the bar area where we had been earlier elated and enthusiastic. “Wow we have started making wine. When do we start pressing? When can we transfer the wine into the barrels” one girl, Beth, asked in one breath.
I admit, the excitement rubbed off on me as well. We were soon fantasizing about the taste of the Pinot Noir, and discussing the designs of custom-made labels, which is the final part of the process. Brooklyn Winery encourages their customers to put their creative hats on to design a label unique to their type of wine. They even hook you up with a designer if you are lacking on the creative front.
The bar stood empty and bare in front of us, waiting to be filled by the winery’s product. Leventhal ushered me through a large wooden door. There stood hundreds of stacked wooden wine barrels, each waiting to be filled with the brewing Pinot Noir.
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