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City Winery founder Michael Dorf on the new St. Louis location, opening this Saturday

During a recent tour of the space in City Foundry STL, the Washington University alum shared details about the location’s design, sustainable wine program, music, and more.

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A new kind of wine experience and live music venue debuts at City Foundry STL this weekend. City Winery (3730 Foundry Way, Suite 158), the nationwide urban winery and entertainment venue chain with a dozen locations across the United States, will open its doors this Saturday, March 18, with an opening-night concert featuring Irish folk artist Gilbert O’Sullivan. Located just west of City Foundry STL's Food Hall, City Winery will occupy nearly 10,000 square feet, housing a small wine-making operation, a 250-seat live entertainment venue, a barroom and restaurant, and flexible private event space. For founder and CEO Michael Dorf, a Washington University alum, the idea behind City Winery came about from an experience with winemaking in California in 2004, his more than two decades of work in the live music industry, and a longtime affinity for wine. During a recent tour of the new digs, Dorf shared details about the St. Louis location’s design, its sustainable wine program, and more.

Read More: City Winery slated to open at City Foundry STL on March 18

Why did you choose St. Louis for the next City Winery location? I know St. Louis—I went to college here, I have friends here, and I will come back... I've been wanting to do this since 2018, as I was building the business plan. I wanted to figure out a way to do a smaller footprint—our Shake Shack, if you will. I wondered if there was a model that we could roll out that could fit in another kind of development, something that doesn't have to be a standalone. Our other locations are 30,000 square feet, and they're hard to do. So I wondered if there are secondary and tertiary markets that could do a 10,000-square-foot, compact version of City Winery.... When I got a call from [City Foundry developer] Steve Smith, I said, 'Let's talk because I am looking for that exact size, and St. Louis is on my Top 10 smaller market list.' I obviously knew St. Louis. I really liked the vision and the aesthetics.

The St. Louis location is also the first of a new model, with a fully functioning winery and fermenting equipment. [It's] the launch of a new concept: a smaller winery, a little smaller venue, and a smaller restaurant. Our Chicago winery is as big as this whole place—just the winemaking, just the winery. Since we’re a bonded winery, we're able to move wine between Chicago, New York, and California, where we also have bonded wineries, bond to bond. Now that we've become this integrated wine business, we can have a small footprint for wine-making, get to TTB [the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau] minimum legally, and make wine with grapes that come in the fall.

Can you share more about how you source grapes and the wine-making process? We're flipping the industry on its head: Instead of making the wine in the vineyard and shipping finished products to where people consume, we're making wine where people consume... In the United States, we produce wine primarily based on the [type of] grapes. So Cabernet is known to grow really well in Napa. In the Willamette Valley [in Oregon], Pinot Noir is doing great. Then, in upstate New York, they're doing well with Riesling. Most people want Cabernet and Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc or Syrah, so we're [sourcing grapes] from the regions where those are grown the best. We take our sources very seriously, and we get world-class fruit. With really good grapes, it's a little more expensive, but you're gonna get a really good product. I also have great winemakers, and we're using quality equipment. We're doing it right.

City Winery also takes a different approach to bottling, with a tap system and growlers. Why put wine in steel kegs? We're taking an environmental approach... With a big show and a busy night, everyone is drinking a young, approachable rosé or good pinot noir or cabernet. We're going through 2,000 glasses of wine in a night, and it's youngish and fresh—it's not wine made to age for a long time. So why open 100 cases of bottles every night? What a waste. We started realizing, Let's get rid of the bottles. Let's be much more environmentally friendly about how we're serving wine by the glass and do the tap system. Then that evolved into a reusable bottle program. We said, We're doing on-premise sales. If someone's going to take wine home and drink it in the next seven or eight days, then why not offer a growler-type environment? [And customers can] get a $5 credit for bringing the bottle back.

You’re also recycling wine-barrel staves by incorporating them into the interior design to help with acoustics and sound-dampening. Yes, a barrel stave is a hard surface, the perfect thing for acoustics. They’re on our ceiling in the main venue, behind the bar—you name it.

And you're integrating a wall of backlit bottles into an eye-catching design. It's a design we've had for a while. It will have a thousand bottles. We'll dim the light, and once the green glasses are across it, it's a really cool look.

The space's layout also ties into the rest of City Foundry, with direct access to the Food Hall. Yes, and it's is where our retail will be. We’ll have wine on tap, too—it's a tasting bottle, [allowing guests to] try anything. And to-go bottles, both regular cork bottles and growlers. And a barrel display that's five barrels tall. You'll be able to see barrels and our signage with upcoming shows while looking in through the Food Hall.

Speaking of food, can you share more about the menu? We've always tried to offer food that pairs well with wine. Seventy-five percent of our menu is consistent between our locations. I love our risotto balls, our duck tacos, our flatbreads... St. Louis is going to get two months of our classic menu, but then we're doing a pretty radical change to our entire menu to get closer to our original roots: We're turning everything into smaller plates. I don't want to say “tapas-style,” because when people think tapas, they think smaller. You'll get, like, three or four dishes that will come out as they’re ready, so it's less of a coursed-out menu, which is hard to do when you have 400–500 people at the same time. We like to say it's all Mediterranean based: Spain, Italy, France, Israel, Turkey, Morocco, and Greece... And what do they all have in common? A lot of fish and foods that pair with wine.

That idea of experiencing great food, wine, and music also ties into your book, Indulge Your Senses. The whole thesis is the need for spaces, in-person gathering, authentic experiences. But textural—the things that indulge your senses. Technology is so omnipresent—you're on your computer all day or on your phone for entertainment and work—that you have this need to go and actually look in the eyes of a performer, hear the thumping [of the music] in your heart. Feel and see things that are real, not artificial. So the material choice becomes very important. 

How does that idea play into City Winery? I wanted to put out the most incredible food spread, for an artist to go, “That's the best meal I've had on tour!” And then to have the stage overbuilt, the sound system and stage monitors be really great, so they have an amazing experience. And the audience doesn't have a column or cameraman in front of them. The consumer has the greatest experience when the artist has a great experience, because we've thought about all these details. It's a feedback loop, and then everyone has a great time. It becomes a magic moment.