Wine & Song (& Profits): Interview with Michael Dorf

Many young men dream of opening a rock club where they can watch their favorite bands and hang out with their friends. But it is only the truly entrepreneurial young man who starts a successful concert venue in New York City using his bar mitzvah savings.

In 1986, at the age of 23, Michael Dorf founded the Knitting Factory, one of the city’s most well-known live music venues. He served as chairman and CEO until 2002. During that time, he branched out from club owner to produce and sell music internationally. Since 1993, Dorf has produced a number of New York’s largest festivals, including the New York Jazz Festival. He produced a tribute series at Carnegie Hall to the songwriters Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Sedaka, Elton John, REM, and The Who. Additionally, he’s produced the Oyhoo Festival, Jewzapalooza, and the Downtown Seder.

Dorf has produced more than 100 events in Europe and has been involved with the Montreux Jazz Festival, the North Sea Jazz Festival, and the Vienna Jazz Festival. Dorf pioneered online music by cofounding the Digital Club Network in 1996.

But in 2008, Dorf opened a very different kind of venue, City Winery, Manhattan’s only winery. In keeping with his love of music and his skills as a promoter, City Winery blends the worlds of wine snobs and live music lovers.

Recently, NY Report executive editor Daria Meoli sat down with Dorf to discuss the importance of fluid business plans, making wine miles away from an actual vineyard, and when to say when.

Daria Meoli: Why wine?

Michael Dorf: I love wine. I’d been going to a lot of wine classes and wine dinners, and traveling to wine country, when in 2004, I got a chance to make a barrel of wine.

My brother called me one day and said his good friend at Ridge Winery had a surplus of grapes—3,000 pounds of cabernet. It was so much fun to be part of the process. I got samples sent to me so I could watch the evolution of the grape from unfermented juice to the finished product. And the wine kept evolving even after being bottled. It’s a living organism, and it developed little nuances. It was just such a unique, insightful experience.

The other element of the process I really got into as a music producer was that I was able to put “Produced by Michael Dorf” on the bottle and give it to my friends. After giving bottles away and talking about the experience with different people, I had so many say to me, “I want to make wine, too” and I realized there’s something to the idea of making a private barrel and learning where your wine comes from.

Knowing where your food and beverages come from is an overall trend in consumer business. But it was my experience of being in the music business that gave me the idea to create this private barrel “club” for people to participate in. The plan was an obvious one for me. I’m a promoter and I wanted to use those skills to connect to wine makers and focus on the consumption of wine, as much as the making of the wine.

This business is the most selfish experience I’ve ever participated in. It’s absolutely what I like to do. I think there are a lot of people who also have these same exact passions. To be able to sit and drink wine at a concert, I don’t know what else I’d rather do, and there are a lot of people who share that opinion.

DM: Has the business done as well as you expected?

MD: We are in one of those tough, but good, positions of turning people away many nights a week because we are either sold out for a concert or we’re doing a private party. Customers can’t really just come and make a reservation for dinner, which was originally part of the plan. So, I’m going to expand upstairs and take over the floor above the club, because we need to add more space to be able to create a restaurant that would allow people to just come and eat and drink wine separate from everything else.

The idea for the restaurant is that, once you’ve made your wine, and you’ve had the opportunity to come and do barrel tastings, then you show off your blending or your barrel to colleagues or to friends, which is part of the whole cache of having a barrel. We would love to be able to allow people to keep at least a dozen or two of their wines in a proper cellar here so that people could have a place to show their wine.

One of the things we want to do with our expansion is have a private cellar room that would allow for dining and entertaining with your finished wine product. It’s the ultimate BYOB, in the sense that it’s bringing your own bottle, and it’s really your bottle that you made.

Flexibility Essential to Success

DM: Having a winery in Manhattan isn’t like having a winery on Napa or even on Long Island. You aren’t located on a vineyard. How does the winemaking process work here?

MD: We have 14 different vineyards that we buy grapes from. And as an urban winery, we get grapes from where the terroir (or land) is best for the particular fruit. We have a full winery license, and basically we allow our members to utilize our license.

The old axiom in wine is that wine is made in a vineyard, which is slightly oxymoronic for our business model in the sense that we don’t have vineyards. But there are actually a lot of great wineries that don’t have their own vineyards. They source grapes from the wine growers, and there’re a lot of vineyards that only produce for other wineries. And some wineries produce a lot of grapes and they put a portion of their grapes up for sale.