BroganCellars.com
Title
Welcome to Brogan Cellars, Makers of Fine California Pinot Noir
Description
It's nothing fancy-a bare bones, makeshift winery arranged under a carport roof in Sonoma County's Dry Creek Valley. You will find there's a sense of deja vu at Brogan Cellars, and for a good reason.
Margaret Wierenga has been down this road before. Margi was a teenager when her father, Burt Williams, started making the first Williams Selyem wines in a bathtub in a basement beneath their garage in the late 1970s. For several years she worked at her father's winery in Fulton as a volunteer before taking a paid position in 1993 at the Westside Road facility. In between, she worked in different capacities at Hop Kiln Winery. In 1998, she decided to follow in her father's footsteps and start her own winery.
Brogan Cellars, named after her paternal grandmother, has all the earmarks of a mom and pop operation. 'It's a bootstrap business run on a lean $75,000 startup budget,' she says. Her husband, Mike, who owns a refrigeration company, is a handyman who rigged up her winemaking equipment. They used small old dairy vats for fermenters and purchased most of the other equipment, including a tiny crusher. The barrel-aging room, office and tasting area are in a tight, 800 square-foot converted garage that Wierenga was happy to call home until 2002, when additional space was obtained in Hopland, 30 miles north of Healdsburg.
