Boulevard Brewing is branching out to wine production

KANSAS CITY — Twenty years ago, home-brew hobbyist John McDonald humbly started mass-producing two beers circa-1935 using Bavarian brewing equipment.

Today, his Boulevard Brewing Co. spreads out over a city block and produces more than 140,000 barrels of beer annually. So it's probably a safe bet that McDonald's new hobby, a vineyard in the Truman Lake area, won't remain a leisure pursuit for long.

McDonald will be harvesting his first vineyard crop this fall, a harvest that he hopes will yield Boulevard's first estate wine, or wine produced entirely on Missouri land. The company has been producing wines from California juices and grapes for three years.

The vineyard "is just a hobby, something I have to remind myself," said McDonald, managing partner of Boulevard Brewing. "But these 'urban wineries' are starting to pop up, making wine in the city. But unlike beer, with wine you only get one chance, once a year."
As for how Kansas City's hometown brewery began tippling in the wine business, well, McDonald said that's a convoluted story.

Here's the distilled version:

Three years ago, Boulevard opened a 75,000-square-foot brewing and packaging facility, topped by the Muehlebach Suite, a 3,000-square-foot event space. The area would be used for company events, as well as rented out for wedding receptions, reunions, corporate shindigs and other events. And, of course, it would include generous quantities of Boulevard beer.

Not so fast.

But Boulevard had a license only to brew the beer, not to sell it. Another hitch: Breweries weren't even eligible to get a retail license. But Boulevard didn't want its customers to have to buy beer somewhere else and then haul the kegs to the brewery.

So the company hired a lawyer.

Poring over the statutes, the lawyer found that Missouri wine manufacturers could sell all alcoholic beverages on their premises with a 22 percent manufacturer/solicitor license and a retail by-the-drink license.

Missouri wants to promote tourism with its wineries.

Boulevard got the licenses and added a little sideline business, Boulevard Wines, bringing in California grapes for a few hundred gallons of wine. Its facility was already set up to bottle beer in champagne-size bottles, so the company just added a destemmer, a wine press and oak barrels. Boulevard's PipJak line (named after McDonald's daughter Piper, 17, and son Jake, 19) of cabernet franc, chardonnay and viognier wines sells for about $15 a bottle in the company's tasting room.

McDonald, meanwhile, planted a two-acre vineyard with 2,000 vines of noble grapes for cabernet franc at his 120-acre Truman Lake property.

Before long, he wondered: Why not use those grapes to produce a true Missouri wine?

"We are trying to make a really good local bottle of wine," McDonald said. "You see all these big breweries selling out to giant global businesses, but the consumer wants to support a local product — beer, and wine, too.

"I like the idea of producing something locally."

If McDonald's fall harvest goes well, Boulevard will begin producing a wine called Henry County (after the Truman Lake area), with about 350 cases available for sale a year from now. McDonald said he hoped to double that production in 2011.

So much for a "hobby."

Boulevard seems blessed to be on top of the consumer pulse with strong interest in local products.

Nationally, craft beer and wine sales are sparkling. During the year that ended Aug. 8, craft beer sales were up 6.4 percent, to 44.5 million cases sold (though only 3.1 percent of overall beer case sales), according to market researcher the Nielsen Co. Table wine was up 2.4 percent, to 116.1 million cases sold, for the year that ended July 25.

"With so many great new and strange brews being introduced by Boulevard Brewery in the last couple of years, it figures they'd now show up with wine, too," said Doug Frost, a master sommelier in Kansas City. "I haven't yet tasted their wine offerings, but with John Skupny as one of their partners and consultants, I'm sure they'll be worth checking out."

Skupny, owner of Lang & Reed Wine Co. in Napa Valley, Calif., was McDonald's college roommate and longtime brewery adviser, lately segueing into adviser in all things wine.

"Skupny is a bit of legend in the Napa Valley; he's a former Kansas City kid, he's brilliant," Frost said.

And although Boulevard can legally sell wine at its headquarters' tasting room, it wants to maintain a good relationship with its retail partners, so it doesn't plan to sell the wine in retail stores.

"Even with beer, we have never wanted to be a competitor with our retail partners," McDonald said. "We're going to take it slow. We have to keep the beer business going, too."