The Pour: Fruit of the Bartered Vine

BERKELEY, Calif. — Broc Cellars fits hardly anybody’s idea of a California winery. You won’t see any cellars, for one thing, or anything remotely pastoral, like a vineyard. The cellars are a warehouse, on a corner in an industrial district here in Berkeley. Across one street is a cement plant. Across another is a motorcycle-repair shop. The melody of passing freight trains plays every once in a while.

But despite the asphalt vista, Broc, in business less than a decade, produces some of the most invigorating, interesting wines in California today. Some are from familiar grapes: zinfandel, grenache and cabernet franc. Others seem tauntingly obscure: picpoul, valdigué and counoise. Each demonstrates that California, better known for wines of power and amplitude, can also do fresh, thirst-quenching and intriguing exceedingly well.

Broc is a tiny operation. The proprietor, Chris Brockway, works with one assistant, Sam Baron, and gets occasional help from his girlfriend, Bridget Leary (when she is not busy buying Broc for her mother’s wine bar, Four2Nine, in Point Richmond).

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Chris Brockway, the proprietor of Broc Cellars, began little by little to make his own wine. In 2013, Broc made 6,000 cases that included 15 varieties. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

But even on this small scale, Broc offers a glimpse into one possible future for the California wine industry, a future that depends on vision, hustle and entrepreneurship rather than, as in Napa Valley, inheritance or making a fortune in another business to finance wine ventures. It’s a vision that may seem cutting edge but in fact is a throwback to California’s past, both stylistically in terms of Broc’s wines and financially, in terms of its shoestring budget.

In recent years marketers have heaped next-new-thing gloss on “urban wineries” like Broc as if they were something novel or revolutionary. In fact, urban wineries have always been around, providing a refuge for small-scale négociants, who generally buy grapes to make wine because they don’t have their own vineyard. Steve Edmunds of Edmunds St. John has operated an East Bay winery for years, as has Rosenblum Cellars, where Mr. Brockway spent some formative years. Another small winery, Donkey & Goat, is just up the block from Broc.

Looking even further to the past, the land under Beaune, France, the urban center of the Burgundy region, is honeycombed with cellars and tunnels where négociants have made and stored wine for centuries. In the age of electricity, without the imperative to dig into the earth for a steady cool temperature, younger Burgundian négociants are content in urban warehouses like Broc’s.

Mr. Brockway, 45, grew up in Omaha, where, he said, his stepfather always had wine on the table and where he developed a taste for zinfandel and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He was a philosophy major at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and ended up in Los Angeles, “doing postproduction work for ads that never made it on the air.” Feeling the wine itch, he pursued an oenology degree at Fresno State in the early 2000s, then moved to the Bay Area, where he got a job at Rosenblum and learned the basics of winemaking.

Along the way, Mr. Brockway stumbled onto two major influences. While at Fresno, he read “Real Wine: The Rediscovery of Natural Winemaking” by Patrick Matthews, a small book published in 2000 that foreshadowed recent trends away from more mechanized and industrial production. The second was a wine bar in San Francisco, Terroir Natural Wine Merchant, where he began to discover wines outside his somewhat narrow conception.

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“If ‘Real Wine’ was the first step, Terroir SF was the last,” he said. “You’d walk in the door and try a wine you’d never heard of before, like pineau d’Aunis rosé, and say, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ ”

His experiences coupled with a conviction that California wine had changed since those evenings at his stepfather’s table. “Back then, zinfandel was all about spicy, brambly fruit,” he said. “I came out here, and the zins were nothing like that.”

And so, Mr. Brockway began little by little to make his own wine: one barrel in 2002 and his first legal batch in 2004. In 2006, he left a day job to strike out on his own, acting as a négociant and gradually increasing his output. In 2013, Broc made 6,000 cases that included 15 varieties.

“It’s always been, make a little wine, sell it, make a little more,” he said.

Mr. Brockway casts a wide net to find grapes, often from odd little patches of unexpected varieties. He gets grenache, grenache blanc and cabernet franc from Santa Barbara County, and picpoul, a Mediterranean white grape, from Paso Robles. He finds zinfandel from Sonoma, carignan from the Alexander Valley and nero d’Avola and counoise, one of the 13 grapes permitted in Châteauneuf, from Mendocino. He buys valdigué, a grape once confused with gamay in California, from two sites in Solano County, and genuine gamay from the Umpqua Valley in Oregon.

At harvest, grapes are picked in the cool of night, and then he drives them back to Berkeley in his flatbed truck. “I’m on the road so much, sometimes I feel more like a truck driver than a winemaker,” he said.

In the cellar, Mr. Brockway is a minimalist. He ferments and ages the wine in a blend of old wood barrels, steel tanks and concrete, and does little beyond stomping the grapes by foot. “The way we make wine, the most important thing we do is decide when to pick the grapes,” he said. “No adjusting, no adding, if we don’t pick at the right time there’s not much we can do.”

Across the board, Broc wines are lively, dry and alive. His 2012 Cassia grenache from Santa Barbara County is snappy, structured, stony and earthy, while his 2012 Santa Barbara County cabernet franc, inspired by Loire Valley reds, is wonderfully herbal. His 2012 Vine Starr zinfandel from Sonoma is a homage to the spicy zins of his childhood, while a 2013 Sonoma white zinfandel is a tangy rosé for guzzling. The wines rarely rise above 13 percent alcohol, and generally sell for $20 to $30.

“I’m not trying to out-weird anybody or obscure anybody,” he said. “We’re trying to get back to a more traditional conception of what wine used to be. Also, we like to drink wine, so lower alcohol is important.”

Like many young California négociants, Mr. Brockway dreams of owning his own vineyard, even if it’s in a less prestigious place like Solano or the Sierra Foothills. More realistically, he would like long-term leases on vineyards so that he can farm and manage them himself.

“With this,” he said, “it’s constantly pushing the rock up the hill.”

Email: asimov@nytimes.com. And follow Eric Asimov on Twitter: @EricAsimov.

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