N.Y. takes a new look at California wines

Call it the bicoastal standoff.

For many California winemakers, New York City represents a holy grail - a mystical place overrun with European wines and Europhile palates. For New York's wine buyers, California still symbolizes a culture of wine and winemaking that resonated with downtown bankers and Upper East Side Baby Boomers, and left everyone else disillusioned.

But as the market for cult Cabernet dangles off a cliff, the city's top wine shops and restaurants are crafting a market for new and interesting California wines - and with it, a novel enthusiasm among an elite, and often finicky, set of wine buyers.

"It's easy to write off California - I know I have - but I think now more than ever there's a reason to pay attention," says Juliette Pope, wine director at Gramercy Tavern, one of the city's top wine destinations.

What's caught her imagination is a growing subset of winemakers "dialing back" on ripeness and making more restrained wines.

"There's a very European palate in New York, and there's really no enthusiasm for the style of wine that (Robert) Parker and the (Wine) Spectator are advocates for," says Wells Guthrie, winemaker and partner at Copain Wine Cellars.

"I changed what I was doing back in 2006. I started picking earlier and making wines with higher acidity and lower alcohol, and I started selling more wine in New York City - imagine that."

Some of Guthrie's critical scores have dropped since 2006, but his wines now sell better in New York than in any other metropolitan market. Pinot Noir or Syrah from his Tous Ensemble line is served by the glass at every one of chef Daniel Boulud's restaurants.

Different perspective

But it takes more than lower alcohol levels to make New York buyers swoon. The sheer amount of wine available in the city - much of it small-production European wines - arms buyers with a different yardstick with which to judge California wine.

"There's a greater variety of wines to compete with, and buyers are more open to esoteric wine," said John Jordan, proprietor of Jordan Winery in Healdsburg. "As a result, there's less room for the staples of the California wine industry, like the Jordans and the Silver Oaks."

Some wine pros are simply looking for something - anything - at odds with California's old guard.

"There's a new thought process among frontier producers that I want to embrace, and that our customers are embracing," says Chris Barnes, the first-ever designated domestic-wine buyer at Chambers Street Wines.

Barnes, who carries labels like Arnot-Roberts and Wind Gap, explains that until recently the California section at the unabashedly Eurocentric store in Tribeca was an apologetic collection of allocated wines that was all but ignored. "No one was buying for the section or taking it seriously," he said.

Yet there's already a demand for producers like Donkey and Goat, which make minimal-intervention wines at its Berkeley facilities, that has brought it more success in New York than out West.

"Not one two-star restaurant in California and not one major California distributor was willing to take our wines when we first released them," winemaker Jared Brandt says. "We kept hearing that our wines were unbalanced, that they were too acidic."

Martin Scott Wines, a top New York distributor, picked up the label and released its first vintage; soon Eric Zillier, wine director at Alto, a two-star Michelin restaurant; and Paul Grieco, wine director at Hearth and Terroir in the East Village - and one of the arbiters of New York's wine zeitgeist - pounced.

Similarly, Abe Schoener, proprietor of Scholium Project, found New York to be more receptive to his uncategorizable efforts, like skin-fermented Sauvignon Blanc.