Broc Cellars

California, Berkeley

Broc Cellars fits hardly anybody’s idea of a Californian winery. You won’t see any cellars, for one thing, or anything remotely pastoral, like a vineyard. The cellars are a warehouse, on a corner in an industrial district here in Berkeley. Across one street is a cement plant. Across another is a motorcycle-repair shop. The melody of passing freight trains plays every once in a while.

But despite the asphalt vista, Broc Cellars, in business less than a decade, produces some of the most invigorating, interesting wines in California today. Some are from familiar grapes: Zinfandel, Grenache and Cabernet Franc. Others seem tauntingly obscure: Picpoul, Valdigué and Counoise. Each demonstrates that California, better known for wines of power and amplitude, can also do fresh, thirst-quenching and intriguing wine exceedingly well.

Broc Cellars is a tiny operation. The proprietor, Chris Brockway, works with one assistant, Sam Baron, and gets occasional help from his girlfriend, Bridget Leary. But even on this small scale, Broc offers a glimpse into one possible future for the California wine industry, a future that depends on vision, hustle and entrepreneurship. It’s a vision that may seem cutting edge but in fact, is a throwback to California’s past. 

Chris Brockway grew up in Omaha, where his stepfather always had wine on the table and where he developed a taste for zinfandel and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He was a philosophy degree holder and initially ended up in Los Angeles doing postproduction work for ads. Feeling the wine itch, he pursued an oenology degree in the early 2000s, then moved to the Bay Area, where he learned the basics of winemaking. Broc Cellars was then born, out of his passion, ingenious thinking and pursuit for discovery.

When starting Broc Cellars, Chris knew he had to forget everything he had learnt and experimented with from his past projects. Inspired and influenced by the natural wine movement of Beaujolais and Loire, he wanted to create fresher style of wines that would the farm-to-table kind of meals that were simply California. 

His wines are made using spontaneous fermentation, a process that means they only use native yeasts and bacteria that exist on the grapes in order to make wine. They don’t add anything – this includes nutrients, yeast, bacteria, enzymes, tannins or other popular fermentation agents. Sulphur is a naturally occurring element in all wine, the amount found can vary. The winery adds little to no sulphites, depending on the wine and style. The grapes that they work with are grown without using synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or fertilizers.

“Our goal in making wine is to bring out the natural expression of the grape. We decide on a wine by wine basis how we want to do that. We have more freedom now to make the choice not to add Sulphur. There is a bigger market for us to go in the direction we want to go. To counter that we are doing more to ensure our vineyards are using the farming practices we support. We’re also committed to detailing exactly what decisions we make during the course of our winemaking process.” – Chris Brockway

These wines showcase the individual characters of their places of origin, having been made with a very light hand. Chris’s wines are much lighter in terms of style and often lean into where the adventurers would call character, but traditionalists might call slightly funky. 

His range of wines includes a Petillant Naturel (a sparkling wine produced in the ancestral method) and a variety of stills from forgotten varieties such as picpoul, valdigué and counoise.