The Urbane Practice of Urban Wine

Working on the final project for this class was a very interesting experiment in ideating and frameworking potential wine business plans. Our final project, Liquidity - The Premier Wine Cellar Marketplace, I believe legitimately has a lot of potential and I can say I learned a great deal just from this exercise in the logistics and regulatory aspect of how this would work. But there were a great deal of other interesting ideas our group considered that also had a lot of potential. One in particular that I thought was interesting was the concept of a chain of high end urban wineries.

Urban wineries are not as new an innovation as may be guessed. Pre-prohibition, making wine outside of concentrated vineyard regions like Napa or Sonoma and in warehouses concentrated near major cities was quite common. [1] Then came prohibition (and the shuttering of many of these operations) and the rise of winemaking as a cultural destination. No longer was wine a commodity to be made in the vein of Coca-Cola, with regional bottling centers. From the 1960s onward, wine production in America was more akin to visiting the U.S. Mint. That is, at least, until the early 2000s when urban wineries became to make a comeback.

Urban wineries are both a meeting place and cultural touch point, with value propositions surrounding accessibility as much as wine quality. [2] That being said, wines across the country are showing they can be made in an urban environment without sacrificing on quality. Urban wineries also have the advantage of providing small operations complete control of their process, a very attractive feature for winemakers who make natural wines. Traditional wine-making hubs like Oregon and northern California are understandably producing terrific wines, but also getting into the mix are nontraditional places like Denver, Austin, and Brooklyn. [3] Some, like Infinite Monkey Theorem and City Winery, are even opening up multiple locations across different cities, showing that a single organization can grow and thrive beyond a single market. It's still early days for urban wineries at scale and whether growth to the mass market can extend beyond "hip" cities like Austin, Portland, and Nashville is still in question. But growth in trending positively so it is likely we'll see urban wineries for years to come.

Sources:
[1] https://www.eater.com/2011/3/1/6694779/americas-urban-winery-revival-what-does-it-mean
[2] https://www.foodandwine.com/wine/what-are-urban-wineries
[3] https://www.foodandwine.com/wine/10-best-urban-wineries-in-country