Ensemble's Calvin Griffin Wants You to Taste the City's Terroir

I spoke to winemaker Calvin Griffin as he was putting labels on bottles of "Rapt and Rosy," the natural wine he made from apples and Catawba grapes grown upstate. He's bringing cases of "Rapt and Rosy," and some blueberries, down from his Catskills vineyard Ensemble to the city for a release party at the Queens carpeted wine and electronic music club Mansions on Thursday night.

Griffin credits his love of farming to a program he attended in high school while growing up between Brooklyn and Manhattan, run by former Beacon, New York history teacher Nat Turner. Turner started an urban farm in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where kids like Griffin would "pay to go there and work on the farm all day, and then do workshops on social justice at night."

But while Griffin says he immediately took to farming, he never considered going into winemaking. "I always thought of wine as this kind of elitist product, that never seemed to be connected to the earth or to the farm," Griffin told me. "It just seemed like it was just like something you'd buy in a liquor store."

After college, Griffin worked on farms in South America, and, he says, "accidentally" ended up on a natural winery in Chile. "I didn't know what this meant at the time, but it was a Louis/Dressner-imported natural winery, which is a famous natural wine importer, to New York City."

"Then I just fell in love," Griffin says. "And I found out that there's so much more to North American viticulture than just California. There's actually rich history before even California was growing grapes, in upstate New York, the Hudson Valley, all across the Northeastern seaboard. True, old fashioned style of wine-making that hit all the boxes of what people want in a natural wine these days: indigenous varieties of grapes, farmed organically."

He slowly started buying used wine making equipment from Craigslist, while continuing to WWOOF on farms upstate and in Vermont, at some point storing barrels and tubing at his mother's apartment in Brooklyn. "I had notifications for when someone would post a wine press or a wine tank. And I would just, like, truck this stuff around with me." He started making hundreds of gallons of wine on a vineyard upstate in 2023, planting 2,500 vines with the help of friends.

Despite the "overarching Eurocentric bias of the wine world," Griffin says, he became fixated with North American wine, and obsessed with the notion of terroir, the way that climate, soil and ecosystem contribute to the taste of the wine.

He also loves electronic music. 

"It's really interesting to think about how the term 'terroir,' which literally just means all of the weather and climate and soil and the environment of a place, can apply to music and art," Griffin told me. He says he's a fan particularly of DIY parties like Bob & Shirley and Club Night Club.

I asked Griffin where other terroir-minded New Yorkers should go in the next few weeks.