We met Bryan in the Spring of 2022 while working on our first Rose+Cider Pet Nat with Luke Wylde. Luke and Bryan were both working out of Abbey Road Farm at the time and Bryan had just started releasing wine under his new label, Human Cellars. Luke had already prefaced us on what an incredible person Bryan was but we had no idea the details. Turns out Bryan’s life has been pretty crazy. He spent 18 years living all across the world (Bolivia, Myanmar, Senegal, Gambia) working with underprivileged farmers, doing everything from teaching how to revive exhausted soils to helping establish a marketplace for new crops. He was working in Myanmar, helping with the rice harvest when the devastating 2008 cyclone destroyed the homes of 2 million people.

He spent the next 3 years helping people rebuild their lives and basically worked until he collapsed. He needed a reset and took up an offer from a French friend to help with their family’s grape harvest and immediately started envisioning a life in the wine world. 

Years of working for large non profits had left him disenchanted with development work and he thought maybe it would be better to be part of a community and run a small business and try to effect change that way. Wine offered a perfect lens through which to do that. After a couple years of wine work in France and Germany, he relocated to the Dundee Hills in 2020. Besides making wine, he is also a viticulture instructor at a local community college and he’s been active in teaching free classes in Spanish to vineyard workers through a program called Ahivoy.

Obviously, for both Jordan and I, he was exactly the kind of person we wanted to work with. One of the great privileges of Post Familiar has been the opportunity to connect with incredible people and to help share their stories to a broader audience. Experimental wine is our trojan horse to building community.

We sat with Bryan and tasted through his lineup and the wines were of course amazing. We immediately started spitballing ideas for a future Post Familiar project together and after shuffling through some fun ideas (skin contact gruner?) he presented us with one of our favorite opportunities we’d encountered in our 3 years of Post Familiar. 

As the viticulture instructor at a local community college, Bryan oversees the vineyards that the students farm. Viticulture students are focused on becoming stewards of the land by learning all aspects of grape farming. Throughout the year, the students farm their own blocks and eventually harvest their own fruit. Bryan said there might be an opportunity for us to work with some of the student grown fruit. We LOVED the idea. Trying to craft something unique from fruit that was nurtured by the next young generation of farmers seemed like a blast. We told him to keep us on his radar.

We stayed in touch with Bryan throughout the summer but never ended up committing to anything because we already had a few irons in the fire for that harvest and didn’t think we needed any more wine. But in late October ‘22 we got a call from him about just the kind of thing that Post Familiar was built for. The student crop had harvested super heavy and at the end of picking there was still a half row here and a half row there of unpicked grapes. It wasn’t enough of any one type of grape to make a specific wine with, so the harvest crews had kind of passed it over.

Bryan thought it’d be a shame to let quality fruit die on the vine so he had them do one more pass and pick the random mix of red and white grapes all together. It did not amount to much, only about a half a ton. The mix of grapes consisted primarily of a red Austrian grape called Zweigelt and then a chunk of Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling. Although all three of those grapes grow in Austria, they are never blended together. Especially not when 80% of the mix is red Zweigelt. 

Despite the lack of historical precedent in blending these 3 grapes, Bryan brought the bins to his winery, de-stemmed them all and threw them in a fermenter together. Part of it was pure logistics; when you have such a small amount of fruit, it’s not really feasible to separate it all out. The other part is intuition. Just because it’s not common to blend these 3 grapes, doesn’t mean it can’t be tasty. Zweigelt brings red fruit, red color and pepperiness. Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling bring freshness and green tropical fruit aromatics. Sounds delicious right?

Obviously we said yes to the project and were thrilled to be highlighting both student farmers and a winemaker in Bryan Berenguer who is actively working to make the Oregon wine community a better place for everyone.