After years of working with wine in New York City restaurants, Chris Leon set out to open his own wine bar. Instead, he serendipitously stumbled upon a small space on Brooklyn’s Fulton Street — just across the way from his apartment — with the bones of a retail store and pivoted to a wine shop instead. Now, a decade after it first opened, Leon & Son is a pillar of Brooklyn’s wine community, and has expanded into so much more than just a neighborhood wine store.
Leon first discovered his interest in wine on a trip across California’s Central Coast with his dad when he was 21 — inspiring the name Leon & Son. After college he pursued other interests, but eventually found himself drawn back to wine. “It just became clear the more I tried to work away from this industry the more I wanted to be in it,” he says. Fully throwing himself into the venture, he moved to Sonoma County. While working with a number of producers out West, first assisting with harvest and then taking on roles on the events and hospitality side, Leon found himself in an exciting time for the California wine industry, recalling events like the In Pursuit of Balance wine fair, which brought together a group of like-minded producers working to change the perception of California wine.
“I was so amped up to see people doing something different and I became really invigorated by the movement,” he says. “So when I came back to New York, I was super disappointed to see that there wasn’t a lot of what I was seeing in Sonoma County represented on lists here.”
After making the move from California to NYC, Leon worked on the floor in a number of wine bars and restaurants, including Brooklyn’s Aska and the now-shuttered Tangled Vine. Then, while dreaming of building a program of his own, the retail space in Clinton Hill changed Leon’s trajectory.
He launched the store in 2015 with only help from a few friends. “It was just me and an iPad and a little bit of wine,” he recalls. In the early days, Leon’s experiences in Sonoma and love for California wine still resonated, inspiring him to curate a hearty U.S. selection. “When I opened the store it was a very, very different place,” he says. “I had maybe a couple hundred SKUs, but I was dead set on having a dense U.S. section because it wasn’t well represented here — I think something like over one third of the store when we first opened was American wine.”
Though the shop has expanded to offer a detailed global selection and an wide selection of spirits, Leon’s excitement for U.S. winemakers pushing the industry forward is still apparent, championing icons like Corison and Arnot-Roberts, as well as up-and-comers like Outward Wines, Florèz Wines, and Âmevive.
With no retail experience, Leon let his background in hospitality guide the business’s ethos, which has come through in the energy of the store since day one. The well-curated walls of wine feel more like you’re touring an impressive restaurant’s cellar than running an errand, and when walking into the shop, you might be pleasantly welcomed in, as if by a maître d’. “I’ve always treated it kind of like greeting people coming into a restaurant,” he says.
Leon also credits his restaurant mindset with how he first approached buying wines for the store. “It’s hard to get allocations regardless of type of account, but because I never worked retail, I never realized that it’s really hard for retailers to get more limited, high-touch wines,” he says. Instead, he just asked for everything. “I have a lot of funny stories where people laughed at me when asking for certain allocations, but I think my confidence and naive nature helped me push for what I wanted in the store,” he says.
As Leon & Son accumulated an increasingly impressive inventory, with wines ranging from back-vintage Burgundies and Barolos to off-the-beaten-path bottles, the shop found a wider audience outside of the local Clinton Hill neighborhood. Developing the store’s website and newsletter, which features detailed deep dives on the wine world’s most exciting producers, drew in wine nerds and industry pros, cementing Leon & Son as one of the top shops in the city.
“I was very conscious that people didn’t give Brooklyn enough credit for the types of wines that could be carried,” Leon says. “I didn’t think you needed to go into Manhattan to get the best wines of the world. Brooklyn is amazing because you can really sell what you want to sell, whether it’s the most natural zero-zero wines or the most collectable bottles.”
But in expanding the business’s online presence, especially during the pandemic, Leon felt that he was losing touch with the most important part of the shop: connecting with customers. So he decided to reinvest in the Leon & Son community, opening an entirely new space in late 2024 to host educational classes and winemaker events. “The classroom space feels like us hitting center on the things that are important to us, which is the community we’ve built for over a decade,” he says.
Now for about a year, the Leon & Son team has been steadily growing its programming, with classes ranging from wine basics to blind tastings and deep dives into grapes and regions as well as meet-and-greets with iconic winemakers. And Leon credits the store’s continued success to this reinvestment in connecting with people in person.
Though the industry frequently bemoans the waning interest in wine, Leon doesn’t see his business slowing down at all. Rather, he sees something more hopeful in how these events reinvigorated Leon & Son’s community of wine lovers.
“There’s a level of engagement happening. And that sort of space and interaction with the community is so essential,” he says. “So many people ask me: ‘Is all of your business online now?’ The answer is no. We’re still so committed and reliant on our brick-and-mortar business. If you are actually doing things that are engaging people and talking about wine in a way that is genuine, then there’s nothing to worry about.”
