A visit to the Merchant Stores at Pier 41, and the Red Hook Winery
The pleasant lounge environment encountered when one visits the Red Hook Winery’s Liberty Warehouse Location is just the front of the house.
Behind the scenes, there is a working winery. The thing you remember most about the place is a very good and incredibly complex smell. It’s the scent of wood barrels and fermentation, and it’s impossible to describe how wonderful it is.
There are covered vats back there which hold fermenting grapes, and you can literally see the wine forming up out of the feedstock.
All of the arcana of modern industry is present as well, bottling machines and forklifts and all that stuff. What’s really interesting here is not some digital inventory control system, however, instead it’s the carrying on of one of the oldest industries in modern times.
This is a refrigerated room where the wines are allowed to age under strictly controlled temperature and lighting conditions. An ancient art, practiced daily at the Merchant Stores building on Pier 41 in Red Hook, Brooklyn.