Sam Rogers' Garage Wine

A preview of the debut pinot noir from the latest Julie Balagny acolyte to take root - or begin to, at least - in Oakland, CA.

Sam Rogers in her garage / cellar in Oakland.

Prone to self-pity, like many writers, I sometimes brood on the precariousness of my circumstances: no salary, no car, no house, the same dingy apartment for ten years, dog looking at me weird, etc.

Then something (Instagram, usually) will remind me of the emotional rollercoaster my emerging-winemaker friend Sam Rogers has been on the past few years, and my self-pity evaporates. I got nothing on Sam, who nonetheless, in all our interactions, manages to meet the day full of sunshine with a wild harlequin grin.¹

Since we were introduced in Oakland in 2019 by our wine writer friend Jenny Eagleton, Rogers, who came up in the artisanal coffee scene, has dived headlong into winemaking internships throughout France and beyond. She spent harvest and vinification that year with Beaujolais vigneronne Julie Balagny, and returned again this year to join in pruning and bottling. In the meantime, Rogers beat a skirmish with cancer, lost her father, and did additional pruning experiences with Jas Swan in the Rheinhessen, Laurent Saillard in the Loir-et-Cher, and Olivier Cohen in the Languedoc. Nowadays she makes ends meet hostessing in cocktail bar while awaiting release of her first wine, a Mendocino pinot noir.

I often say there are two ways to fall in love with natural wine. The most common is to begin purchasing and consuming lots of natural wine. The second way, far rarer, is to find yourself rearranging your entire life in such a way as to permit you, yourself, to make natural wine. No one is keeping statistics on the number of plucky souls embarking on route number two, but I seem to count a lot of them as friends.

Late in October I visit Rogers at her cellar, a tiny, antiquated wooden garage beside her bungalow in Oakland. Inside sit her seven used barrels of pinot, plus a few experimental odds and sods.

“My original plan this year was to head back to France for another harvest,” she says. “But I’d brought a dog home from Beaujolais, and once we arrived back in California, I realized I couldn't put him through that travel again so soon. Making my own wine made the most sense to me, as a way to be more rooted in California.”

Rogers is no stranger to the Bay Area natural wine scene, having perennially made herself available for pick-up work with Shaunt Oungoulian and Diego Roig of Les Lunes / Populis Wine, Brent Mayeaux of Stagiaire Wine, Dani Rozman of La Onda, and many others. (She also worked as a sales representative for Roni Selects, Mission Wine Merchants, and Soil Expedition.) Oungoulian and Roig put her in touch with the grape grower who farms the pinot noir parcel, which is dry-farmed, and on the path to organic certification in 2023.

“The ripeness was all over the place,” she says. “But we did the best that we could to like pull, as many leaves as possible in advance of harvest. That made a pretty big difference.”

We’re tasting alongside friends with far more experience in California cellars, including Oungoulian (Rogers’ occasional mentor and fellow Balagny acolyte), and the aforementioned wine writer Jenny Eagleton. I venture that the first barrel of free-run juice we taste is exceptionally pretty. Fresh, lucent raspberry fruit, just faintly oak-tinted, at this young stage. It is surprisingly kink-free and expressive at this young stage. I could mistake it for very well-made Savigny-lès-Beaune. (I am not well-versed enough with California terroir to identify what is Mendocino-like about it.)

We taste through the rest of the barrels of what will be Rogers’ only substantial 2021 release. (Barring a few anecdotal experiments with sauvignon, cider, and a sugarplum co-ferment.) All are dry already. Most, as might be expected from barrels containing greater proportions of press juice, show degrees more extraction and reduction than the first. One has taken on peanut-buttery notes from a development of flor; Rogers plans to section it off from the rest of the cuvée. About half saw a seven-day, handsoffish whole cluster maceration in plastic bins, with the rest macerating up to ten or eleven days in small steel tanks.

Rogers flips intermittently through an exhaustively annotated cellar log, seeking the precise details of each barrel. For all the precariousness of her situation, Rogers is hell-bent on adhering to the best practices she’s learned over the past three years.

Oungoulian, balancing his young baby son on his knee throughout the tasting, finds the pedantic note-taking touching.

“Our first couple vintages, I would try to put a plus or check mark on good barrels, when I was tasting through them. But there was definitely no rhyme or reason. It would change so much,” he says. “Next thing you know, you have too many barrels.”

Sam Rogers
Oakland, CA 94606

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FURTHER READING

An October 2022 visit to Rogers’ occasional employers, Shaunt Oungoulian and Diego Roig of Les Lunes / Populis Wine.

A March 2019 visit with Shaunt Oungoulian of Les Lunes / Populis Wine.

A 2015 piece on Julie Balagny.

1. Sometimes, as on the Saturday before Halloween at The Apéro Club in Santa Cruz, she is dressed as an actual harlequin. I wish I’d taken photos that evening!