There is something special going on in the New York wine community.
It has nothing to do with convention-sized festivals with VIP passes. Little to do with Grand Tastings and rows of tasting tables beyond the interest level of most consumers.
It’s happening at the neighborhood level. Grounded in retail shops and local restaurants, yet truly a community of interest across the city, bringing the most interesting and quality wines–in the most natural way–to the broadest group of consumers possible. One sip at a time.
We see this happening individually by the sheer number of tastings in the city (now 1000 in the last 6 months!) offered by the shops, importers and distributors, bringing winemakers from every part of the globe to pour for customers from Green Point in Brooklyn to Washington Heights in Manhattan. In single store festivals like the month-long WhiskeyFest. All toll, over 2000 different wines and spirits have been poured for free since August of last year at retail wine shops.
This street side festival trend is a step beyond, taking the success of tastings as both sales and celebration to a community level.
And forging a nod of cooperation across independent merchants, distributors and importers. It’s as if with visibility and transparency of supply-side availability through innovators like SevenFifty, and consumer-side visibility of tastings and online access through my own theLocalSip fledgling community, a corner is turning for the wine world as it has for so many market segments
This idea struck home to me last Fall when SherryFest 2012 took the city by storm. We tip our hats to festival organizers Rosemary Gray and Peter Liem, who not only created something new, but also understood the importance of free retail tastings. theLocalSip partnered with them, and on one Saturday in October, 27 wine shops in 20 neighborhoods, with winemakers at hand, poured Sherry to thousands of New Yorkers. Many found tastes they liked and walked out, bottles in hand.
For the last week and into this one, on a smaller scale, two festivals are happening which are breaking new ground at retail and bringing to our immensely complex city a new view of a grass roots festival. This isn’t a street fair in one place in Little Italy, it’s a celebration that is happening simultaneously in the Upper West Side, Chelsea, Flatiron, TriBeCa, the Village and throughout Brooklyn.
Two importers, Jenny & Francois Selections (a mainstay of natural wines in NY) is hosting Natural Winemakers Week, and Indie Wineries (a new boutique importer of artisanal wines) is hosting Indie Week. Together they are bringing to the New York, a celebration of natural and small production wineries from around the globe.
These are mini festivals, small in scale but powerful in quality and access.
A dozen or so shops participated, a handful of wine dinners and workshops, and really great parties. Jenny & Francois, free to all at the Ides Bar at Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn. And from the guys at Indie Wineries, a tweet simply invited whoever wanted to join them and ten winemakers at 10 Bells in the LES for drinks and wine talk.
While modest in scope, this is grass roots at its best from the street level up. Over 30 winemakers are in town from across the country and all over Europe. They are pouring wine and chatting about how they make it. They are at bars and parties, meeting their fans and making new ones.
And there is a community of buyers, bloggers, shop owners, restaurateurs, sommeliers, importers, distributors and just hundreds of people who love wine, socializing, tasting, having fun, celebrating a love of wine as a connector of people and cultures…and buying lots of it from their neighborhood merchants.
This is a win for everyone.
The customers get to do what they must—taste before they buy, not in a convention center, but down the street in their neighborhood, kids and dogs in tow as they go about life, or post work on the way home. Shops are getting discovered by new wine lovers who didn’t know they were just down the street or around the corner.
And having a city-wide celebration across shops and restaurants, in many neighborhoods, percolates the buzz, lets the word spread broader and with more impact than it can possibly as a single event in one shop. It lets a wine tasted somewhere in Park Slope get shared online to a friend who can buy it or find it being tasted in Chelsea the next day.
I’m a believer that this is the start of something really interesting.
There will be many of these, cross distributor organized I bet, where we as consumers will find Saturday festivals on wines from the Jura, Savoie, Republic of Georgia, Beaujolais or the Loire Valley. Or themed around grape varieties, Alpine wineries or important to understand ideas like no sulfur wines.
All poured by experts. All poured for the consumers. Paired with restaurant menus. And everything purchasable.
I’m loving this. As a consumer. A wine blogger and enthusiast. And as a dreamer for web driven community commerce that happens neighborhood by neighborhood
A big shout out to everyone in the New York wine community who is making this happen. A big heads up to everyone across the country that all of this excitement may be happening here, but all of these wines being tasted are available online to be bought wherever you are.
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Ever question that wine tasting is the perfect mix of learning, having fun and meeting new people? Check out the photos from theLocalSip community.
