Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Abe Schoener & His Brooklyn Winery

Abe Schoener, the founder and wine maker of the Scholium Project, is branching out from California. (For more info on Schoener, check out my previous posts on him and his wines.)

Schoener and Mark Snyder (a Brooklyn-based wine distributor) will open an urban winery in the Red Hook region of Brooklyn. The winery will be located on Beard Street and is slated to open this summer. It will produce wines only from grapes grown in New York and will initially use only Long Island grapes as they are the only ones currently available to them. In time, they also hope to source grapes from the Hudson Valley area.

About five or six vineyards have already promised to sell them grapes, only one to three tons per vineyard, which means production will be low. The grapes are mostly Sauvignon Blanc but there are some Bordeaux grapes to, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc.

The wines will be named differently from the Scholium Project wines. The labels will likely bear names associated with the Brooklyn area and its history. The first wines could be bottled as early as next January.

With Schoener's success in California, it looks promising for this new venture. New York is already producing some excellent wines and I am sure Schoener can do the same. His wines could be forefront of creating "cult" wines from New York.

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