At Sones Cellars in Santa Cruz, Rachel Morphy refills her
bottle with the winery’s popular Hedgehog Red blend.
Photo by Deborah Luhrman.
When you hear the word “keg,” you most likely picture red plastic cups, beer bellies, rowdiness or memories of high school parties of yore. But in the last few years, the term has started to find a home with a quite different audience. Wine on tap is becoming more and more commonplace at cafes, wine bars and upscale restaurants throughout the country.
The idea is nothing new—wine served and sold in bulk actually has a longer history than today’s commonplace 750-milliliter bottle. A wide variety of containers from barrels to wineskins have been utilized to hold the prized juice since its creation.
But now, advancements in technology and storage stability, and an increased environmental vigilance on the part of consumers and producers alike, have opened the door to a whole new lineup of alternative wine service formats. And lucky for us, it’s catching on here in the Monterey Bay region.
Santa Cruz County wine tasting typically means back roads, hairpin turns and mountain vistas, but the Surf City Vintners collective came along and introduced everyone to a more urban experience. Located at the Swift Street Courtyard on the Westside of Santa Cruz, the dozen wineries that make up Surf City offer a wide range of tasting profiles. Two in particular also provide a new way to serve them.
Jeff Emery of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard is one of the first winemakers in the county to offer wine on tap. The method is advantageous to restaurants serving by-the-glass wines because of the extended shelf-life capacity, and there is a tremendous reduction in packaging and waste due to no bottle, no cork and no labeling. Right now, you can find Emery’s Bobcat Red blend at Main Street Garden Café in Soquel, and hopefully more venues as word spreads.
Sones Cellars, next-door neighbor to Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, has begun to offer wine in a similar way, but by spigot instead of tap. Its Hedgehog Red blend, primarily composed of Zinfandel grapes, fills a large barrel in the winery’s tasting room. Buy an empty, specially labeled Hedgehog stopper bottle and then fill ’er up. Return when it’s all gone and get a refill at a discounted bulk price.
This has become a popular table wine for a lot of folks, and like many of the other alternative formats, produces less waste and should leave a smaller carbon footprint than the production and shipping of traditional wine bottles.
But the local trend is not limited to Santa Cruz alone: Monterey and San Benito County fruit is ending up in a variety of vessels near and far.
Calera Wine Company in Hollister, for example, is offering its Central Coast Pinot by the keg.
Meanwhile, FLASQ Wines, a company based in St. Helena, Calif., offers from its website 12-packs of aluminum bottles containing Monterey Chardonnay. The bottles hold just two glasses’ worth of wine, but they’re reusable and American made. And Black Box Wines, a company aiming to create an upscale packaged wine market, sells a Monterey County Chardonnay in a 3-liter—you guessed it—black box.
If all of this is making you curious, you can be sure that a multitude of alternative format wines are out there just waiting to be poured—from everything but that 750-milliliter bottle.
About the author
Amber Turpin is a freelance food and travel writer based in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
