LOCAL WINES

Philadelphia’s homegrown booze scene is in its prime. In the last couple decades, local spirit-makers have brought new vitality to old warehouses in nearly every corner of the city. First came the breweries, then the distilleries and the cideries. Now, it’s the wineries’ turn.

Local and regional vineyards have been putting out high-quality, nationally recognized wine for years now, but urban wineries are a relatively recent development. Unlike wineries with their own vineyards — where owners are on the hook for farming and winemaking — urban wineries are laser-focused on the liquid.

No winery claims to be Philly’s first, but the likeliest candidate is Overbrook-based Mitchell & Mitchell, a husband-and-wife operation launched in 2012 by Frank and Kenya Mitchell, who source grapes from the world over.

Like Mitchell & Mitchell — who vends its wide-ranging wares at the Clark Park, Lansdowne, and Headhouse Square farmers markets — some of these wineries lack a traditional tasting room. Forget rolling hills and grapevines; you might not even see a barrel. They bear more resemblance to a bar, a beer garden, or a cafe. And the wines can be as unconventional as the settings. So pour a glass of chambourcin or sparkling Riesling and get to know Philly’s next-generation winemakers.

Camuna Cellars

Eli Silin’s winemaking environment is the antithesis of a vineyard: His press, tanks, and barrels live in the windowless spare rooms of a sneaker and clothing warehouse in Northeast Philly. If you want to sip wine outside, you can do so in the shade of an 18-wheeler.

This setup is purely functional, allowing Silins, a Chicago-area native, to operate this one-man show “quite literally on a shoestring.” Silins made wine in California for years before moving east with his wife, Bucks County native Molly Nadav. He launched Camuna here in 2020, producing South Jersey chambourcin and merlot, a Virginia seyval blanc, and a cider-seyval blanc blend made with Chester County apples in his first year. He has doubled production every year since and has further experimented with co-fermentation — fermenting fruit together from the start, rather than blending liquid post-fermentation.

Silins’ approach is simple but exacting: He looks for the best fruit — not just grapes, but also Asian pears, crab apples, berries, etc. — grown as holistically as possible within a couple hours’ drive. He deploys a light touch in his winemaking, using native yeasts and eschewing fining, filtering, and sulfites. He’s leaning more and more into South Jersey, where he recently planted a small vineyard of his own with experimental hybrid grapes. “I’m interested in regionality,” Silins says. ”[I’m] just trying to kind of let the place speak.”

WHERE TO DRINK THEM: Good luck finding Camuna’s obscure headquarters — you’re better off buying Camuna at outlets like Bloomsday’s Fancy Wine Shop, Martha, Tiny’s Bottle Shop, the Bottle Shop on East Passyunk Avenue, and Di Bruno Bros. It’s also found in California, New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire. P.S.: All Camuna wines are kosher.

TRY: dark, tangy 2021 City Glou, made with 100% chambourcin grapes from South Jersey.

Mural City Cellars

Malvern native Francesca Galarus and Lehigh Valley-raised sommelier Nicholas Ducos started dreaming up their own winery circa 2016, while they were both working in the Miami hospitality scene. They spent the next five years laying the groundwork. First, Ducos did winemaking internships in Napa Valley and New Zealand. In 2017, they moved to Philly. Ducos then took an assistant winemaker job at William Heritage Winery in South Jersey, familiarizing himself with the region’s grapes, growers, and winemaking styles. It all culminated in 2021, when the couple opened Mural City in a 1,200-square-foot garage on Amber Street in Kensington.

Ducos and Galarus source grapes from farms in a 300-mile radius of Philadelphia, or “as far north as the Finger Lakes, as far south as Virginia, as far west as Lake Erie, and as far east as the North Fork of Long Island,” Ducos says. They’ve made about 3,000 cases of 13 different wines per year, putting out familiar varietals with a tweak (think sparkling chardonnay) and dry takes on regional hybrids like traminette. “We’re just kind of playing around every year,” Ducos says. “We actually have yet to make the same wine twice.”

WHERE TO DRINK THEM: Galarus and Ducos signed a lease on a 3,000-square-foot garage at 1831 Frankford Ave. that will be Mural City Cellar’s new home (opening TBD). After the winery wraps its second summer as the wine garden at Kensington Station in mid-October, you’ll still be able find its wines by the glass at Zahav, Laser Wolf, Jet Wine Bar, Martha, and Two Robbers and by the bottle at Di Bruno Bros., Bloomsday, Local 44, and Bottle Bar East.

TRY: grippy, citrus-forward skin-contact pinot gris made from West Chester grapes.

Carbon Copy

When longtime brewers Kyle Wolak and Brendon Boudwin left Tired Hands to launch their own brewery in May 2020, Boudwin approached Wolak about a tangential passion: winemaking. “I understand if you don’t want to try to include this in the business, but it’s something I’m gonna pursue regardless,” Boudwin told Wolak. Thankfully for Philly, Wolak was into it.

That’s how Carbon Copy opened in the former Dock Street West firehouse at 50th and Baltimore in late 2022 as Philly’s first combo brewery/winery. Both Boudwin and Wolak make the wines, which they’ve been squirreling away by the gallon since 2020. They’ve worked with chambourcin grapes from Pennsylvania, cab franc from Virginia, pinot gris and Riesling from the Finger Lakes region, bringing the fruit back to their West Philly winemaking facility and processing it by hand (and sometimes by foot). All the wines are spontaneously fermented.

For this year’s winemaking season, which starts in September, Boudwin hopes to source grapes even closer to home. Carbon Copy also plan to debut its piquette, a carbonated, low-alcohol beverage made from grape pomace, the solids left behind after grapes are pressed.

WHERE TO DRINK THEM: Carbon Copy’s wines — which aims to offer a white, a red, and a pink or orange wine at all times — are on draft at its West Philly home and its South Philly satellite tasting room, at 1646 S. 12th St. (formerly Separatist Beer Project). Bottling for wine and piquette is planned for the future.

TRY: aromatic traminette, a cold-hardy hybrid grape variety descended from Gewürztraminer.

Forin

You might identify Forin as a coffee shop, not a winery, and for good reason. The Kensington cafe, which opened its second location last February, only got its winery license this year. But its winemaker, Drew Horne (brother of Forin co-owner Kyle Horne), has been practicing his craft more than a decade, specializing in honey wine. When the opportunity to open a second space presented itself, Forin’s owners — Horne, Seth Kligerman, and Will Landicho — approached Drew about folding his work into the business. “It kind of made sense, as part of the family, to tap into him,” Kligerman says. Horne, Kligerman, and Landicho all have corporate backgrounds and diffuse connections in the East Coast hospitality circuit, so they’re big on collaborations. That shows up in the wines they’ve produced so far. Besides an ube honey wine, the shop has made a skin-contact white vermouth with Mural City and a blueberry honey wine with Riverwards Produce. They’re also partnering with local wineries to serve Forin-branded table wines for $8 a glass. Currently their honey wines are made at another location in Kensington, but with time and more space, Kligerman says they’ll pursue more traditional winemaking in-house with Pennsylvania grapes.

WHERE TO DRINK THEM: For now, Forin’s wines are exclusively found at its all-day cafe at 2525 Frankford Ave. (where you can also find guest wines from Mural City and Camuna). Order a flight for $16 or a Forin citywide (Hale & True cider and a shot of honey wine) for $7.

TRY: tart, botanical Forin/Mural City vermouth, which reads more like a fortified orange wine.