By Emily Williams
The Mountain Brook Shopping Center on Culver Road is home to a new concept in local wine offerings.
An equal parts partnership and friendship between Brandon Loper and Trent Stewart has resulted in an equal parts wine store and wine bar, Golden Age Wines.
The space opened officially July 19, offering low-intervention wines grown sustainably. Though opening any business is a stressful process, both Loper and Stewart say the experience has been fun.
“The reason that it is still fun for us and we aren’t very stressed out is because we love this,” Loper said. Exploring new wines with friends is something they would be doing at home, anyway; now they have a “house of wine” to gather in, instead.
“Every moment where we have been super exhausted or stressed, we’ll peek over at the wall and talk about what wines we can’t wait to open,” Stewart added.
Start With a Story
A documentary filmmaker, Loper hasn’t always been interested in wine.
“I really sort of got into food, wine and culinary arts through coffee,” Loper said.
While living in San Francisco with his wife, Amanda, he honed a love of specialty coffee that led him to create a documentary on the subject, “A Film About Coffee.”
“I traveled to Rwanda, Honduras, Japan – kind of all over the world – and did a deep dive into coffee,” he said.
“Through that I learned how coffee has a sense of place and there is a farmer behind it.”
During his travels, Loper began to see a connection between the stories of coffee farmers and those of small wineries. Like specialty coffees, low-intervention wines offer more of the flavors of the place where they were grown – flavors that are easily eliminated by chemical processes.
He moved back to his home state of Alabama in 2016.
“I was still traveling a lot and going back to San Francisco about once a month,” Loper said. “I’d bring back a bottle of wine and have it with friends.”
Those friends would then ask where they could get these low-intervention wines Loper was showing them, but they weren’t available anywhere in town.
Loper knew he wanted to create something brick and mortar to fill that void and tell his latest story. He wanted that story to highlight sustainability and the humanity behind the product – the stories of the people who made the wine.
Add the Expertise
Simply a wine enthusiast, Loper needed to team up with a professional to tell that story properly.
Enter Trent Stewart.
After working for the wine department at Western Supermarkets for three years, Stewart dove into the wholesale wine business.
Stewart and Loper heard about each other many times through mutual friends and finally decided to meet.
“We had a really nice lunch on the patio at Fon Fon one day and realized we enjoyed the same wines,” Loper said.
Stewart’s original intention for the meeting was to learn more about this wine concept Loper wanted to bring to Birmingham, and maybe help him navigate the market from a wholesale perspective.
“But then, something changed,” Stewart said. They became fast friends, meshing so well together that the conversation changed from informational exchange to a partnership.
Stewart brings a high level of expertise with his Level 4 Diploma from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. He will be not only helping pick the wines to stock in the store, but he also can conduct tastings and lead classes on the products it serves and sells.
The focus for the store’s offerings, according to Stewart, is small artisanal estates that offer lower-intervention wines grown through an organic and biodynamic process.
“Old world wineries do that,” Stewart said. “But there are also some new and exciting wines to try, and those guys are pushing the envelope a little bit on what is possible.”
Wines found on the Golden Age shelves are typically going to be new to Alabama, as Stewart strives to bring in wines that aren’t already available in town.
“We’ll have up to 15 wines by the glass and we’re going to constantly rotate it,” Stewart said, so customers won’t be seeing the same wines every time they walk in. Customers also can buy a bottle and drink it at the store for a minimal uncorking fee.
Just as Trent and Loper are always excited to taste something new, they want their customers to find something new each time they visit.
While Golden Age doesn’t serve meals, it serves enough snacks to make one.
There are cheese and charcuterie boards created using the store’s hand-crank meat slicer handmade in Italy, with local peaches, fresh sourdough bread and crackers, warmed Castelvetrano olives, Marcona almonds and more.
Set the Stage
Loper’s wife, Amanda, a partner with David Baker Architects, designed the Golden Age space, delivering on the three main things Loper and Stewart wanted: space for about 800 wines, a big bar and a private room.
“She did a great job of taking what we wanted and translating it into something that was way more amazing than we could have come up with,” Loper said.
The space is light and bright, with earthy touches of sand and rust colors through wood and leather.
“To go along with our story, we wanted a lot of the materials to mimic or have a connection to the wine-making process,” Loper said. The materials are also repurposed or recycled.
The ceiling features red and white oak, often used to make wine barrels, and are salvaged from American Cast Iron Pipe Co. pipe shipping crates. The large concrete bar is a nod to some of Loper and Stewart’s favorite wines, which are aged in concrete. The tile on the bar is Alabama red clay.
“We hope at some point to be a zero footprint establishment,” Stewart said.
“We really just wanted to have as minimal a footprint as possible,” Loper said. “That’s what we preach in the wines we drink and we wanted to follow that.”
The shop also will use washable linens rather than paper towels and serve sparkling water on tap rather than bottled.
Tables in the front room are scraps from a marble yard and pieces purchased on trading sites such as Etsy, Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. In the private room, which can be rented, cane chairs sourced from various thrift stores surround a large wooden table that used to be the centerpiece of the conference room at U.S. Steel.
Rather than including enough shelving to fill a library, the wines fill the walls like artwork.
Share the Result
Both Loper and Stewart stress that Golden Age is a place for all levels of wine knowledge.
“We don’t want people to feel overwhelmed when they walk in,” Loper said. “There is a lot of wine on the shelves, but we tried to design it in a way that is easy to understand.”
The store welcomes people of all levels of wine knowledge, including those looking to buy a bottle or stock a cellar.
Loper and Stewart also are excited to share the stories behind the wines they sell, things that they learn, taste and hear from importers as well as some of the makers.
“A dream becoming a reality is always an exciting thing,” Loper said. “That in itself is enough …, but this is even better.”