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Producer Masterclass Series: Julia Alvarez-Perez – The Grapes Nobody Warned You About: A Hybrid Masterclass
Saturday August 22 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
The Producer Masterclass Series Continues
We’re pulling back the curtain.
New York Kitchen is thrilled to launch an exclusive new chapter in beverage education: the Producer Masterclass Series, bringing the brilliant minds behind your favorite bottles out of the cellar, out of the vineyard, and into the spotlight. These are the people who rarely leave their craft long enough to talk about it. Knowledgeable, passionate, and typically impossible to access…until now.
The Grapes Nobody Warned You About: A Hybrid Masterclass
Some of the most exciting wines being made today come from grapes most people have never heard of. It’s time to change that.
Hybrid grapes are reshaping the wine world from the ground up, and winemaker Julia Alvarez-Perez is here to show you exactly why she can’t stop working with them. In this course, Julia takes you on a deep dive into one of wine’s most dynamic and delicious frontiers: what hybrids are, how centuries of experimentation have shaped them (and continue to), and why forward-thinking winemakers and farmers are embracing them with growing excitement.
You’ll explore the real advantages hybrids bring to the vineyard: greater resilience, lower environmental impact, and extraordinary potential for sustainable, low-intervention winemaking. But the heart of this class is in the glass. Julia brings her winemaker’s palate and infectious passion for these grapes to reveal just how complex, nuanced, and downright delicious hybrid wines can be, and why working with them is one of the most creative and rewarding things happening in wine right now.
Whether you’re a curious wine lover or an aspiring winemaker, this class will leave you seeing the vineyard, and your wine rack, in a whole new light!
About Your Instructor
Julia Alvarez-Perez knows wine from the ground up, quite literally. With nearly a decade in the Finger Lakes wine industry, Julia brings a rare combination of academic depth, hands-on farming experience, and a true winemaker’s intuition to everything she does.
After earning her Master’s in Food Culture and Communications from the prestigious University of Gastronomic Sciences in northern Italy, Julia honed her hospitality and palate working in acclaimed restaurants in New York and San Francisco. In 2019, she and her husband founded Usonia, a winery rooted in organic farming and low-intervention winemaking from both vinifera and hybrid varieties. She also serves as winemaker at Buttonwood Grove on Cayuga Lake.
Julia’s work sits at the intersection of tradition and curiosity, and there’s no better guide for a class about grapes that are doing exactly the same thing!
And because no great class is complete without great bites, Chef Pam Cecere will delight with one of her signature nosh plates to round out the experience perfectly.
Seats are limited. You won’t want to miss this one.

Details
- Date:
- Saturday August 22
- Time:
-
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
- Cost:
- $60.00
- Event Category:
- Beverage Classes
Venue
- Wine Spectator Theater @ New York Kitchen
-
800 South Main Street
Canandaigua, NY 14424 United States + Google Map - Phone
- (585) 394-7070