Crushpad Hits NYC

To make us East Coast wine enthusiasts feel a bit better about living far from the center of the action, the folks at San Francisco-based Crushpad packed up their homemade wine and traveled cross-country to lure amateur winemakers to a tasting in New York City on April 28. Having already committed to making a barrel of Zin, Marc and Lori represented our group and traveled down from Boston to check out just what kind of wine was pouring out of Crushpad--an ardous job but somebody's gotta do it. Crushpad rented out a slick, two-story loft space in Chelsea with a deck overlooking the Hudson River.

After a rickety ten-story climb in the elevator, Marc and Lori emerged into the sunny, whitewashed space to be greeted by rows of bottles of Crushpad wine from the 2006 vintage. These wines with temporary labels calling out the varietal, year, and maker were barrel samples of the wine currently being made from the 2006 harvest by people in the NYC area. This would be the first time many of these winemakers would be tasting their in-progress juice. Excited by that prospect and of seeing our bottle on that table next year, Marc and Lori grabbed a map and proceeded to the section marked "whites." Over the two floors, tables were set up by varietal, each manned by a Crushpad employee who would describe the wines being poured and answer any questions.

Under the "early bird gets the most wine tasting under their belts" philosophy, Marc and Lori were among the first attendees to arrive at the event. This proved to be beneficial as the Crushpad employee pouring the whites was Dave, with whom much correspondence had passed over the past few weeks. Dave immediately recognized our names, and we chatted for a short time, with Dave confirming receipt of our check and informing us that we got the last barrel of Teldeschi Zin.

Then it was time for the tasting to begin. With the first pour of the afternoon, Marc and Lori were immediately blown away by the quality of the wines from Crushpad. The sauvignon blanc from the Galleron Road Vineyard in Napa Valley (Rutherford) was crisp, clean, and citrusy, and immediately Lori demanded that we make a barrel. It rivaled the best sauvignon blancs we have had recently from New Zealand and South Africa. The chardonnay was truly a barrel sample, as evidenced by its still cloudy appearance and slight effervesence. Again, however, it was clear that this would make a terrific wine, with all the structure and fruit that one would look for down the road.

At the cheese table, Marc and Lori ran into the only non-Crushpad vendor at the event, who runs a wine storage facility, Vintage Wine Warehouse, in Queens, NY. For those without enough space, his services run the gambit of showing up at your house and packing up your wine, storing it in a temperature controlled facility, culling out what you want and redelivering it, or shipping it anywhere in the world. Since a personal Crushpad pickup of our wine would be logistically difficult to say the least (despite intense interest from Ryan in a cross-country wine tasting trip), this is the likely destination of finished wine for our eventual pickup. Perhaps the giveaways at his table, though, were the best part of the interaction. Apparently many of his well-heeled clients don't care to keep the wood boxes of their fine wine, and he had scores of the printed ends of these wood crates for the taking. Marc and Lori can now pretend to have worked their way through cases of Mouton Rothchild, Château Cos d'Estournel, Château Margaux, and others.

After provisioning up and learning where the wine would head to for pickup, Marc and Lori settled into tasting the reds, beginning with the three syrahs on the same floor as the whites. Of the three 2006 syrahs, the White Hawk Vineyard Syrah from Santa Barbara was terrific -- lush, fruity, deep, and rich, but well balanced and drinkable even at this early stage. Simply a great wine, and Marc and Lori would have bought some right then and there had it been available.

Moving upstairs, Marc and Lori were thrilled to see that the zinfandel available for tasting was their very own Teldeschi vineyard from Dry Creek Valley from the 2006 vintage. So, with a little trepedation (what if it is terrible, and we have a whole barrel coming to us?), Marc and Lori sidled up to the table and had their first taste. It was what everyone had hoped when we chose the Teldeschi in the first place: a real zin, with strong fruit, good balance, and without any hotness from high alcohol content. Hooray! We won't end up with 25 cases of cooking wine! After some more cheese and visits to the cabernet sauvignon table, Lori persuaded the zin pourer to donate a bottle to our cause, so Katie and Ryan could also see just what they had invested in.

After two and half hours of tasting the wines made by Crushpad, as well as a customer's barrel sample (a fellow attendee offered us a taste of his Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah from Mendocino--which, while clearly tannic and needing more time in the bottle, had nice potential), we were happy to say that the winemakers at Crushpad clearly know what they are doing. They will be able to help our group of amateurs make some great wine. And, the group of people who work there, holding our dream jobs, mind you, are fun, knowledgable, and enthusiastic about what they do. We look forward to working with them.

As we were getting ready to leave, Marc discovered the benefit of being male as he ran into a fellow Crushpad client and winemaker Dain Smith in the restroom. In our research into Crushpad, we learned of Dain Wines. While Dain certainly is a unique name that would stick in your mind, he was instantly recognizable to Marc due to another favorable trait: having gotten the seal of approval from none other than Robert Parker. Dain, fortunate to have a friend who is a distributor and was able to get his wine to Parker, received 92 points for his 2005 Brosseau Pinot Noir. Other Pinots and Syrahs from his 2005 vintage earned equally as respectable 90s from Parker. We were happy to have had the chance to speak to someone like Dain who has turned an interest and a dream into a reality, with the help of Crushpad.

With Crushpad shirts, corkscrews, and wood winebox ends, Marc and Lori shuffled off to Penn Station to take NJ Transit back to good, old friends living in Maplewood, who, after a long day of planting rosebushes, put up with tales of NYC winetastings over a terrific dinner.

Crushpad on NPR

Crushpad founder Michael Brill was recently interviewed on NPR's Weekend Edition.