A Midtown winery? Yeah, that’s a thing now.
Sable Gate filling glasses and a niche among millennials with welcoming vibe
You won’t find any vines hanging around Houston’s newest winery. Located on Travis in Midtown, Sable Gate Winery is firmly planted in an asphalt-laden stretch of the city. But there’s nowhere owners Szilvia Konya and Bob Egan would rather be.
“Houston is a great place for something like this right now,” Egan says as he stands in front of a large chrome tank, where his wife, Konya, is pouring their newest wine into a bottle.
“There’s a lot of microbreweries, but there’s not micro-wineries. And people don’t want to travel to Fredericksburg on a regular weekday. The microbreweries are packed,” Egan continues as Konya clamps down on a corking machine, sealing the bottle of syrah. “So, we thought this might be a good alternative for people who aren’t beer people. And we don’t need a vineyard to do this. So why not have it in the middle of the city? It’s a great place to meet up.”
The couple opened the winery in November, and in the first few months, it’s operated largely as a place to host a party or grab a glass — or bottle — to sip. But they recently acquired additional equipment, which enables them to host blending and bottling parties.
The grapes in the winery come from a California distributor, as did the original batches of wine they served until they put the finishing touches on their production line earlier this year.
“They provided us with the initial wine inventory,
and now they’re sending us the grape juice and the crushed grapes,” she says.
No, you won’t find any Texas grapes in the bottles along the back of the bar. Rather, they stock grapes sourced from five continents.
And to say the millennials are loving it is an understatement.
“This generation, they’re perfect for this,” Konya says. “I would say about 65 percent of our guests are young female professionals. That age group, they have an extreme affinity for wine.”
It’s more than just an affinity. It’s an obsession.
According to the Wine Council Market, millennials drank 42 percent of all wine imbibed in 2015, leaving all other generations in the dust. Baby boomers were the grapeguzzling runners-up, with 30 percent of consumption.
“And I think part of that is because it’s a fun thing to drink, and you don’t have to know a lot about wine to enjoy it,” Konya continues.
It’s also super social — especially at Sable Gate, where Konya says she can’t even begin to count the number of bachelorette parties that have funneled through the doors since it opened.
“There’s at least one a week,” she says. Just think of the Instagram potential of a horde of young women in matching outfits taking turns corking their own bottles of wine, with custom labels to commemorate the occasion. The image is a perfect distillation of 2018.
“Often it’s three or four girlfriends coming in together for a night out, though I can imagine it being a good date night, too,” Konya says. “There’s teamwork in blending and bottling. So then you get to imagine how the other person works with you, right? Which is important.”
She laughs the way she must when the winery is jam-packed full of estrogen. Like she’s here for the ride and pleased as pinot to be a part of everyone else’s fun.
But there’s business in the fun, too. And she hopes that people come away from the winery with a better understanding and appreciation of wine. That’s why she stocks 22 reds and eight whites.
“My purpose is to create an environment where everybody — whether they know a lot about wine or very little — they feel comfortable,” she says. “I’ve had bad experiences when I’ve been out to a fancy restaurant, and the sommelier made me feel like I should know a lot more about wine.”
That takes a lot, considering Konya grew up in a crop and wine-farming family in Hungary.
Sable Gate has its own staff sommelier. But like Konya, she has a simple, fun philosophy: Trying new wine is the best way to find what will someday be your favorite variety.
“A lot of our guests come in, and say, ‘I don’t like white wine,’ ” she says.
At that point, the challenge is on. Konya lets loose a big smile.
“I tell them, ‘Give this a taste, and you’ll see if you like it or not,’ ” she continues. “You need to taste things you don’t know. That’s the fun part.”