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It’s been a busy and wild spring, but we caught up with Comstock’s Magazine earlier this season to talk about what we do up at the farm, what it’s like pivoting a business during covid, and some of our plans for the future!
Read the full article over on their website! Thanks for the spotlight, Comstock’s!
Julianna Boggs is “director of everything not making wine” at Tabeaux Cellars in Amador County.
How do we love thee, albariño? Let us count the ways!
1) Medium-high acid, notes of bright citrus, and maybe a little bit of mineral salt air that makes us long for the beach and summer days.
2) Wonderful bouquet in the glass- think tropical fruits, honeysuckle, lemon, lime…
3) Drink it alone, pair it with food, keep it chilled, let it warm up in the glass- this wine is highly adaptable to any kind of drinking and is incredibly juicy and addictive. Before you know it the bottle is gone, though that part actually makes us sad.
If you’re already familiar with albariño you likely know it as a Spanish wine from Galicia or Rias Baixas, or as one of the main components in a Portuguese Vinho Verde blend, but albariño has been on the rise here in California and for great reason! The grape loves coastal climates that concentrate its ocean-breeze minerality, but when grown farther inland in warmer climates it shows brighter fruit notes, as mentioned above.
When we found a nearby organic vineyard growing the varietal we were very excited to have the opportunity to work with it. So it is that this spring we’ll be releasing our first white- the 2019 albariño, 4 barrels made (just need to find time to make the new label- I know! I know!) Our organic albariño is a juicy bomb of bright fruits like mango and nectarine, and because of its high acid it’s a great palate cleanser pairing well with a wide variety of food textures. It works especially well with any food underlining the citrus notes in the wine: think fresh lemon on fish tacos, herby chicken dishes, or even sushi.
First wave of cases will be going out to our wine club members late this spring, but after that it’s up for grabs until it’s gone! Summer 2020 is shaping up to be delicious.
Autumn: for farmers it’s the season of well-deserved naps. A time when the work is (mostly) done and you can actually step back for a moment to catch your breath after months of picking, planting and toiling under that eternal, burning California sun. At the Boggs Market Farm our summers have always been busy, but the winery has added a special note of panic and, ok, excitement to the season’s to-do list. We finished our winery expansion construction and new crush pad just a week before the grapes were picked and delivered to the farm. Altogether we crushed seven tons and have plans for four new bottle releases in the coming seasons.
Our brand new winery expansion includes home-milled, cedar plank barn doors that slide fully open for access to the crush pad. Inside we have our stainless tanks for fermentation, as well as our cold case wine storage, leaving our original space free for equipment storage, lab equipment, and our barrel area.
Our favorite new varietal this year is the albariño, a Spanish white varietal similar to sauvignon blanc. We’ve loved albariño for a long time, but its recent growth in popularity in California meant we could finally source it from a vineyard close to home. Coming from a small, organic vineyard in Lodi, the albariño is showing big, bright tropical aromas of mango and pineapple, with a mineral driven salinity at the finish. It’s perfect for pairing with lighter dishes or for any-season daytime drinking…we judge not lest we be judged.
The rest of the 2019 vintage is made up of a Rhone varietal co-ferment of grenache, syrah and mourvedre, with some syrah held separately for an additional blend we’ll be crafting next season. We also crushed one ton of carignan, half pitched with conventional yeast and half left to ferment with native yeasts, making it our first foray into natural wine. So far the natural carignan has proven complex, smooth and bone dry just 10 days after crushing. Coming to one full barrel, the natural experiment will be a very limited release so long as we can keep from drinking it all ourselves.
We spent every weekend this summer working the Amador Farmers Market in Pine Grove and Sutter Creek. Despite the heat, the market was the perfect opportunity to meet with new customers, old neighbors, and make connections with lots of new farmers and friends. Pictured is our usual table set up complete with both medals we earned this summer for the 2017 primitivo: a silver at the Orange County Commercial Wine Competition for our wine label design, and a bronze at the Amador County Fair for the primitivo division.
As always, we hope this post finds you well and look forward to sharing more with you soon! In the meantime, don't be a stranger. We're on Facebook, Instagram, and available by email so don't hesitate to reach out and let us know how you're doing.
Until next time,
The Boggs Family at Tabeaux Cellars
Now that summer is upon us we're excited to be adding the Pine Grove Farmers Market to our weekly sales schedule. Just 5 miles from where our grapes are grown, wined, dined, barreled and bottled, we could hardly be selling closer to home. Join us every Friday from 3-6pm at the Pine Grove Community Park for a complimentary tasting, bottle purchases and wine club sign ups, plus some Boggs Market Farm cherries we'll be selling on the side due to a serious bumper crop this month!
Can't make it to the market? You can still order 4 and 6 packs of our 2017 Primitivo by sending us an email, or join the wine club via our website! Wine club members save 12% on full case orders, plus an additional 10% when you buy three or more cases a year. Learn more about wine club boons and benefits by clicking on our “wine club” tab.
In the meantime, cheers to the summer and hope to see you all soon!
The Boggs Family at Tabeaux Cellars
It would be misleading to say that it’s cold outside, but for California a gray sky and 60 degrees is enough for us to declare it winter and begin our seasonal hibernation. The rains have been making polite appearances, just stopping by for the afternoon on their way to somewhere else, as it were, but even their modest watering has given us farmer-ly optimism for the new year.
But enough of the weather, let’s talk business. For the big crush in August we processed 10 tons of primitivo from our neighbor’s vineyard down the road. A portion of the morning was spent troubleshooting a new machine whose directions were in Italian, which added a little romance to the frustration. For the most part though, the smooth rumbling of the destemmer masked the jeering comments of anyone standing by who thought they could work smarter or faster (watch a video of Mama Boggs working the crush here), and in the end everyone enjoyed the satisfying privilege of a well-deserved drink, which is presumably why anyone goes through the trouble of laboring over wine in the first place.
Now that the active wine-making season has settled into a period of sitting and waiting, we’ve been playing around with a new release that will be available to our wine club members next year. In addition to our 2018 primitivo, we have two bourbon barrels aging our Reserve Zin, whose possible name and label is a topic of much debate during these quiet days. We’re also blaming our oenological-idleness for the inspiration to expand the winery next year, thereby allowing us more tank space and a new varietal release. A Tabeaux Cellars petit syrah, perhaps?
By now our wine club members should have their cases on hand and have hopefully enjoyed their first bottle. As we’ve mentioned before, the 2017 is still young, so we suggest giving it a rest for 3-6 more months, if you can stand to wait. If you’re curious about it now, open your bottle 15-20 minutes before drinking, or pour through an aerator to give the wine a chance to open up. You’ll be able to tell the difference!
If you’re still interested in joining the wine club for yourself or buying a membership as a gift for someone else, click on over on the Wine Club tab today. There are only 12 days of Christmas but your wine club membership gets you goodies all year long. And by goodies we mean wine, which is a very welcomed gift by any measure.
If you’re not ready for a full case, we’re currently processing 4 and 6 bottle orders for those friends looking to try it out. If you’re interested, click the Contact tab to send us an email and we’ll process an order for you.
We would be remiss to keep this final bit of good news to ourselves: we’re welcoming a new member to the Boggs Market Farm this month, our 10-week-old chocolate lab, Mongo. He is already much adored and can’t be separated from Papa Boggs who has become his best friend and protector. For now, Mongo seems to be content napping in laps, but we’re confident he’ll be chasing chickens and tripping us up in the winery soon enough.
Before we sign off, we'd love to hear from you! Let us know how you're doing and if you have any ideas you'd like to see us implement in the coming months. Interested in Tabeaux Cellars swag? Want more events to celebrate with us? We're always looking for an excuse to share with our friends and family, so click the Contact tab to send us an email and let us know how we can serve you better.
By this time the kettle is probably whistling and guests will be arriving for the holidays any moment- you really need to get going, we understand. But let us close with this: 2018 was an exciting year for us and we have more in store for 2019, so check back with us soon. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram and we'll be sending email updates as the months go on. Meanwhile, thanks again for your support this year. We hope you're all having a warm and joyful holiday season and wish you a very happy new year.
-The Boggs Family (including Mongo) at Tabeaux Cellars
Since we began accruing tanks, barrels, bottles and corks a little over two years ago, July 25 2018 marked our first bottling as a bonded winery. In years past, bottling day has been a family affair involving much bickering, wine sloshing, trials and errors, though we ultimately always met the challenge. But this year our greatly increased inventory demanded a higher level of sophistication, so we partnered with the folks at Drytown Cellars in order to use their very handy bottling line. Though the line does quite a bit of the work it still took six of us to load in the bottles, apply foil, adjust labels and move boxes, making for a hectic and demanding afternoon as you can see here:
As you may have surmised, we emerged from this tribulation triumphantly with 330 cases of our 2017 Primitivo bottled and boxed, leaving a couple hundred cases worth of vino for bottling later this season. Some of this will be reserved for bourbon barrel aging for a special upcoming release available to our wine club members. This of course demands that we stop drinking it ourselves, which is asking a lot because it’s really quite delicious. If you haven't joined our wine club yet, don't worry! There's still time. Find all the information regarding memberships and sign-up here.
For all of our current Wine Club Members, we want you to know that your orders are being safely stored in a nice cool place while they mature in ways that we as a family never will. As the vintage is still young we’re allowing it to develop for a few more months before we box up shipments and send them off to you all. For our local friends, we’re experimenting with kegs for distribution to local restaurants and hope to have bottles available at select shops as soon as the ’17 vintage has proved itself ready to pour. In the meantime, we hope you’re all enjoying these last few weeks of summer. From our family to yours, cheers!
