Holiday Winery Pop Up Saturdays in December

Join the winemakers of Stomping Girl for a holiday

Winery Pop Up

Complimentary wine tasting and gift bottles available for purchase

Saturdays in December

3:00 – 5:00 pm

@

1820 Fourth St, Berkeley

 

By The Glass at Two Top San Francisco Restaurants

I am very exicted to announce that Stomping Girl Wines are now available at two top San Francisco Restaurants, COCO500 and the Moss Room.

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to pour our wine for Clay Reynolds, the Executive Beverage Director for both restaurants. I was hoping he would like one of our offerings and serve it at Coco500.

I first poured our 2008 Sonoma Coast from Split Rock Vineyard for Clay.  We were swirling, sniffing, tasting, spitting and then I calmly waited for feedback…. finally, “I like it! Really nice wine, smooth, red berries and elegant finish.”

We chatted a bit about wine making protocol, cold soak, barrel selection, the vineyard location, our low intervention practices and selection of sustainably grown vineyards , while I opened our second wine–the Lone Oak Vineyard from Santa Lucia Highland.  Same ritual, see, swirl, sniff, taste, spit. Longer wait this time…”Wow, you used the same wine making protocol?” Everything was the same, apart from a slight increase in new French Oak.  What he was noticing was the difference in the vineyard locations.  The Santa Lucia Highland location has specific flavor profile (a very long way to say “terroir”, which I try to avoid) versus the Sonoma Coast, Split Rock Vineyard.  “Amazing how remarkable the differences are. I get more of the bass tones on the Lone Oak while the Split rock is a more high tones wine. I like this one too,”  says Clay.  His description also included these observations:  earthy undertones with a solid backbone of fruit, plummy with a lingering light acidity.  We both agreed the Lone Oak managed the new French Oak nicely.

It’s great tasting with someone who appreciates the fruit of your labor, especially if you learn something in the way of adjectives (high tones/bass tones.)

Clay could not make up his mind which one he’d take, so in the end he decided to take both. One for Coco500 and the other for the Moss Room.

Lorreta Keller , who owns Coco500 is an advocate for sustainably and locally grown ingredients. Keller is a co-owner of the Moss Room along with Charlie Phan (of Slanted Door fame), but is in charge of the kitchen where her style of cooking is carried on. Keller is known for her emphasis on using high quality, locally grown, seasonal ingredients in her Cal-Med dishes which produce bold flavors.  The Moss Room is a masterpiece of a restaurant built under the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. The Moss Room practices the same philosophy of locally grown, organic when possible, ingredients. Locally grown is taken to extreme some times–they grow some of the greens and berries they serve in the restaurant right on the roof!

We are really excited about this opportunity to showcase our wines alongside some incredible food made the way we like it and the way we make our wine. Local, sustainable, tasty!

Check it out before they run out!  Cheers!

 

Stomping Girl Celebrates International Women’s Day

Stomping Girl Wines is named in honor of Uzi’s independent and hardworking grandmother who grew grapes and made wine on the family property; for Uzi’s sister who was originally “employed” to stomp the grapes for the family wine; and for Kathryn, Lea and Hannah–our modern day Stomping Girls who stomp the grapes, punch the cap, press the wine and are involved in our family winery.  (read more about our history here)

To honor and recognize these women in our family and women everywhere, Stomping Girl is celebrating International Women’s Day this March 8th by donating 10% of our wine sales between now and March 8 to a non-profit group called Mujeres Unidas y Activas.  This group educates and advocates for Latina women, many working as domestic and childcare workers on issues such as immigration law, domestic violence and women’s health.  Stomping Girl is proud to be able to contribute to MUA.

To help you help us donate 10% to a good cause, we are offering Free Shipping anywhere we ship in the US on orders of 2 bottles or more placed by March 8th.  Click here to order and use promo code: IWD.

There is not a better day to raise a glass and salute the women who make a difference in your life than International Women’s Day.   Cheers!!

 

Release Party A Success

Stomping Girl’s Inaugural Release Party was held on Saturday February 6.  I will venture to say that a stomping good time was had by all.  We poured our newly released 2008 Pinot Noirs: Split Rock Vineyard (Sonoma Coast) and Lone Oak Vineyard (Santa Lucia Highlands.)  We had a lively crowd, Deborah Crooks and her trio playing music, excellent “volunteer” helpers, and even the weather cooperated in the end.  Thanks to everyone who turned out!

 

Stomping Girl Release and Wine Pick-Up Party

The moment we’ve all been waiting for is here! Come join us in celebrating the inaugural release of Stomping Girl wine. We’ll be pouring our newly released 2008 Pinot Noirs, serving food and enjoying good music.

What: Stomping Girl Release and Pick Up Party
When: February 6, 2010, 2:00 – 4:00pm
Where: 2323 4th Street, Berkeley, CA
Cross street is Bancroft, our driveway is across from Kiss that Frog

RSVP: Party@StompingGirlWines.com
Please RSVP by February 1

Why Pick Up? If you order wine by February 1, you can pick it up at the party, get 10% off and pay no shipping.  Order wine at stompinggirlwines.com using coupon code “PreRelease” or by calling 707-317-6617.

 

Bottling Sonoma Coast – 2008 Split Rock Vineyard

Last Thursday we bottled the last of our 2008 wines.  “Last” sounds like we made many wines, we only made wine from two vineyards, but it does feel good to have our 2008 vintage safely in bottles. Now we wait for the delicate Pinot to recover.  As many of you know, wine goes thru a shock when it is bottled and needs some rest to recover before it is ready to drink.

Even though the bottling process is mostly automated, contrary to our home wine bottling in the last 7 years, we still make sure we touch every single bottle and leave our prints on  it. Such are the joys of winemaking.

Take a look at the steps in pictures:

First the bottles are emptied of oxygen, filled with wine and the wine level is adjusted.

Bottling Machine

Corks are inserted and the red sleeves are put on and spun into place.

Corks inserted and bottle sleeves put on.

Next, the labeler applies our lovely label to the bottles.

Labels applied to Stomping Girl Pinot Noir

Then the bottles come off the line and are boxed by hand.

Kathryn boxing Stomping Girl Pinot

 

Harvesting our Beresini Pinot Noir

We had our first harvest this week for 2009–our Beresini Vineyard Pinot Noir.  The fruit, beautiful, tasty and at perfect Brix (sugar) and pH levels, was telling us it was time to pick.  Those of you in the Bay Area know that Mother Nature was not in agreement, however.  She handed us some rare and unexpected thunder showers just before our planned harvest date. Luckily Beresini is in the Carneros appellation just north of most of the weekend showers that hit our area and with a minor date adjustment, we were able to pick, sort and de-stem the fruit without a problem and under sunny skies.  Uzi was in the vineyard to help harvest and take the video and then met us at the winery with the grapes.

Sorting Beresini Pinot Noir

 

Stomping Girl website is Live

We have finally launched our website after weeks of preparation.  After evaluating web development firms; writing content; collecting images; co-ordinating email subscriptions,analytics, graphic design and photography; and testing…our site is up.  Check it out at www.StompingGirlWines.com

We went for the minimalist design, similar to our low-intervention style of wine making.

We will continue to update our blog and you will find a link to it from the site, so the URL should be easy to remember. Just click on Blog on our Home Page, or go to www.StompingGirlWines.com/blog

Since our wines are not ready to be released yet, the e-Commerce part of the site is not live yet. We are working on enabling the Allocation and Futures modules on the e-Commerce site and are hoping to have that up in a month. Stay tuned.

 

What’s in a name?

The label of our hobby wine is Domaine Carlotta.  Domaine, of course, refers to a property with vineyards that produces and bottles it’s own wine. We do have a few grapevines in our back yard here in Berkeley but fruit from better wine-growing regions go into our wine.  However, since the wine I’m referring to here is for our own consumption we didn’t worry about the technicalities.  

Carlotta is the name of the street we live on.  In a side note and much more interesting story, Carlotta is also the name of the Belgium-born wife of the Austrian archduke Maximilian who served a term as Emperor of Mexico during the early 1860’s.  His term, during a short French intervention in Mexico, was cut short by his overthrow and assassination.  

,

Carlotta Empress of Mexico

Our next door neighbor and his friend (both Cal professors of Mexican descent) reminded us of this colorful bit of history while we were discussing current and potential names for our wine.  The Mexicans apparently had nothing against Carlotta, in fact they rather liked her.  They were simply rejecting foreign rule and had no choice but to kill her husband.  Carlotta, as a result, suffered profound emotional collapse and slipped into a state of paranoia upon her return to Europe which haunted her until her death.  That makes for a good story to tell when asked about our wine label; however, truth is, we really named our hobby wine after the street we live on.  

Now we are working on the name and label design for our 2 Pinot Noirs that will be released and available commercially later this year.  We considered keeping Domaine Carlotta; after all, that is where we got started making wine.  Besides, if we needed to spice things up a bit, we had the great story and images of intrigue and drama surrounding Carlotta, Empress of Mexico.  

Ultimately we decided, heck, you know what, we have our own genuine, even intriguing, female figures in our own interesting family history.  This is what inspired our entry into winemaking and eventually inspired the name we’ve chosen for our new release:  Stomping Girl Wines.  We founded Stomping Girl last year in honor of Uzi’s grandmother who started the family winemaking tradition and recruited Uzi’s sister, then a child, to stomp grapes during harvest.  Nowadays, we don’t stomp the grapes, of course. Rather, Stomping Girl is used more in a figurative sense represented by our daughters and myself, involved in the winemaking alongside Uzi.  We are confident it represents our family and our wine as well.

  

 

Bay Area wineries grow

Too wet and rainy to drive up to Napa or Sonoma on the weekend? Don’t despair, you can still visit a winery and support your local community .There has been a proliferation of wineries right here in the Bay Area. In the East Bay alone we have 17 wineries that are members of the East Bay Vintners Alliance.

A good write-up about the newest East Bay wineries was done by Contra Costa times writer and blogger Jessica Yadergaran.

Across the bay, last Thursday, the San Francisco Wine Association inaugural tasting event was held at Crushpad in San Francisco.  Sixteen member wineries participated. The driving force behind SFWA is John and Sharol Tarabini of Damien Rae. A crowd of a couple hundred people was definitely enjoying the event along with me.  The event was described in a Wine and Vine article and by a local SF blogger, a Wine Brat by her own account, in a post titled when the lights go down in the city.

Given that we live in Berkeley but make our wine in San Francisco,  maybe we should hedge our bets, enjoy both worlds and join both organizations. Any opinions?