Social tap8/19/2023 ![]() ![]() “We encourage people to drink the wine within a month or two,” he says. Wines are sold in 750ml bottles and filled to order, dosed with protective nitrogen and then sealed with bar-top corks. The current selection includes a 2021 Rhône-style red blend, a 2021 Sierra Foothills Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, plus a non-vintage sweet Angelica, something that Cappelli specializes in. In the newly opened tasting room, customers can taste a revolving list of a half-dozen wines on tap. The wines are produced in 2- to 5-barrel volumes and are unfined and unfiltered, then racked into 15-gallon kegs. “We have spent the last 18 months getting permits and remodeling the structure into a bonded winery with a tasting room,” Cappelli says.Ĭappelli makes most of the wines himself, from vineyards within an hour's drive of Placerville, but he also buys a small amount of bulk wine from the wineries for which he consults. He sold the vineyard a few months after the fire and moved the family to a house in Placerville, where he also bought a building along the town’s historic Main Street. The turning point came in 2021, when the Caldor wildfire came within a few hundred yards of his vineyard. “Of the 21 vintages, I might have been in the black for four or five,” he says. While Cappelli envisioned the simple life as a gentleman farmer with his wife, Belinda, and their kids, it didn’t all work out as he'd hoped. He enjoyed working his own vineyard, but to pay the bills he consulted as a winemaker and built quite a business. He bought the 14-acre Herbert Vineyard in 2003 and the following year packed up and moved to the mountains. He liked the wines, the terroir and the slower pace. That was one of the reasons Cappelli was drawn to the Sierra Foothills in the first place. He liked the little wines,” Cappelli, 62, says. “Napa makes wines to be the life of the party, but André didn’t believe in the hype. Napa and Sonoma are too high-priced to try such an experiment, but the math still works in El Dorado and Amador counties, where family-owned vineyards produce wines of character at a good price.Ĭappelli, in a way, is circling back to a lesson he learned from his mentor, the late André Tchelistcheff. If any region can pull off that combo of quality and value, it’s Sierra Foothills. “It should be considered a staple like bread.” He’s not talking cheap supermarket dreck, but wines that are handcrafted from local vineyards, made in small batches and show a distinctive sense of place. “I really wanted to show American consumers that wine is food,” Cappelli says. What does Cappelli mean by reasonably priced? About $12 to $16 a bottle-wines to drink every day. ![]() “In Italy, France and Spain, many towns have wine shops featuring local wines that are delicious and very reasonably priced, and the bottles are filled on demand.” “Our business model comes from Europe,” Cappelli says. Now, two decades later, he is taking on a new challenge: Cappelli Wine, a winery and tasting room in the California Gold Country town of Placerville. He was ready for a change after 17 years as winemaker at Swanson Vineyards, and wanted to build something to call his own. When we first pitched the idea to the prisons, we were really excited by how receptive they were to it – there is a real need for new employment and training opportunities for people who are in custody.Winemaker Marco Cappelli gave up “the bright lights of Napa Valley” for the serenity of the Sierra Foothills 20 years ago. Speaking to as many breweries as we could confirmed our idea: brewers are the most helpful, open-minded and awesome people and we couldn’t imagine a better environment to begin breaking down barriers and creating something new and exciting. Craft brewing is a young, social and vibrant industry in which people are proud to be involved it involves practical but skilled work and it requires technical, transferable and highly marketable skills. We all had a keen interest in craft beer and had been homebrewing, and with Tess’s industry knowledge, we realised that the rapidly growing craft beer industry presented a really exciting opportunity to create something huge. Whilst we all have different experience and qualifications (Paul is an independent criminal barrister and university tutor Amy is currently undertaking doctoral research in criminology and Tess is a bachelor of commerce grad with craft beer bar and retail management experience who worked as a counsellor securing Canadian pardons for ex-offenders), we share a passion for social justice and wanted to create a space where people from all walks of life come together to share skills and talent, exchange ideas and experiences and create new opportunity, particularly for those people who have had contact with the criminal justice system.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |