Musical winery-restaurant headed to Atlanta

The "it" is City Winery, and it is the brainchild of music promoter and producer Michael Dorf.

In 1986, Dorf founded the Knitting Factory, a music venue and recording studio located in New York City and eventually other locations around the globe. After his successes in the music industry, he turned his attention in 2008 to his other passion: wine. Rather than completely bail on music, he fused his loves into the world’s first winery/restaurant/concert hall/wine education/home winemaking/private event megaplex.

With degrees in psychology and business, somewhere along the line you’d think Dorf would have heard that you can’t be all things to all people, and that you shouldn’t try. Apparently, he missed that class.

City Winery, located in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, has been a huge success and spawned outposts in Chicago and Nashville, with Boston to open later this year. Ironically, City Winery Napa closed in January after 17 months and $4 million of renovations in the historic Napa Valley Opera House. They all can’t be winners.

Let's be clear that while dozens of concerts have already been lined up for Atlanta, and a menu featuring locally sourced, wine-friendly fare is coalescing, City Winery is a real winery with fermentation tanks, barrels and a bottling line. And, surprise, a winemaker.

I sat down with David Lecomte, chief winemaker for City Winery, in February to discuss the logic of making wine in a city. We chatted at the uber-hip Ponce City Market, the site of City Winery Atlanta.

“The fastest growing segment of the wine market is 25- to 35-years-olds, and they will be living another 50 years, I hope. We have a huge population of these consumers around us here,” Lecomte said gesturing to Ponce City Market condos and the manifold residential construction projects nearby. “We want to share our experience and love for wine with them.”

Lecomte makes about 20,000 cases of wine a year among the current three locations. That number will rise to about 25,000 with the openings in Atlanta and Boston. He will source grapes, mostly white, from North Georgia, with the remaining grapes coming from various locations, such as Virginia and California.

Lecomte’s wines are no roadside attractions, either. A native of the Rhône Valley, France, with a long list of winemaking accomplishments, he goes to great lengths to get the grapes or the unfermented juice to the wineries in the best condition possible. City Winery owns 9,500 picking bins (and they’ll rent some 10,000 more) that are shipped to the vineyards on picking day. Lecomte personally manages all logistics of transport for the grapes from the time they hit those bins until they arrive at the winery.

He also takes great pride in the sources of his fruit. City Winery just signed a long-term contract with the owners of Napa Valley’s Stagecoach Vineyard, but also gets grapes from vineyards of Alder Springs in Mendocino, Calif., and Haystack Peak in Napa’s Atlas Peak, among others.

“The target for us is not to just increase production, but to always increase quality,” Lecomte said. City Winery makes a bunch of different wines, but they also will offer 400 other wines from around the world.

Dorf’s original concept for City Winery had customers making their own wine. In 2004, Dorf made a barrel of wine with the help of an experienced winemaker in California. It was transformative for him, and he thought others would cherish the same experience. That didn’t exactly pan out.

“At first, we projected selling about 80 percent of our production in our Barrel Members program,” Lecomte said. “In the matter of months, it was near zero percent.”

City Winery still offers customers the opportunity to make their own wine, but it comprises less than 10 percent of Lecomte’s output.

City Winery Atlanta has aspects that are fun all by themselves, but put together — music, food, wine and winemaking — the sum is greater than its parts. And that is hip.

Its grand opening is scheduled for May 2.