March 2026 Wine Club
Alli Lanphear Vineyard & Winery Siegerrebe 2024
The vibe: Hey clubbers, happy March! Are we feeling the early spring vibes? We’ve got a pretty stacked event lineup this month at the shop featuring six winemakers with a focus on women in wine and our March club lineup follows suit - all the wines this month are made by women! Our first bottle comes from a winemaker we debuted in the club last year, Rebecca Alli Lanphear. As a bonus if you’re lucky enough to make it on club pickup day you’ll get to know her firsthand! We had the pleasure of visiting her winery on Vashon Island a few months ago and let us tell you - what a gem. The Puget Sound AVA stretches across half the length of Washington and all the way to the west Cascades but only about twenty wineries actually grow grapes within the region. Rebecca focuses on varieties like this one, Siegerrebe, a German varietal well suited to growing in the coldest and wettest wine region in the state. Her wines are fresh, lively and incredibly poised with balanced acidity from the slow-ripening growing season. She only makes a handful of cases of each release, so we’re happy to have gotten our hands on enough for the club!
The winemaker: Rebecca and Damon Lanphear have been growing organic food together on Vashon Island since 2000. During this time they deepened their understanding of slow, natural fermentation processes producing wines, cider, and mead all from fruits and honey locally sourced including Chasselas grapes from an old vineyard planted on Vashon in the 1980s. To better educate themselves they traveled through France, mostly Alsace, and Burgundy, and spent time in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, studying how small scale winegrowers crafted their wines and drew inspiration from the ancient winegrowing region of the Republic of Georgia They applied their learnings and began planting in 2007, over time developing a natural winemaking style true to what makes Puget Sound wines unique.
The geeky details: With a harvest date of September 14, 2024; the blush grape, Siegerrebe, is noted for its ultra-early ripening date. The grapes were de-stemmed, crushed and left to ferment on the skins for three weeks in the ambient fall temperatures. After fermentation the must was pressed by hand using a traditional basket press and further aged under natural flor in neutral tanks. The unfiltered low alcohol wine was bottled in December of 2025.
Serve: With a chill.
Food pairing: This Siegerrebe has delicate floral notes but remains dry and light on its feet - pair it with equally delicate dishes like mango salad or spicy dishes with some heat, or try it as a pairing with dessert!
Album pairing: Santino Surfers - Santino Surfers
Margins Wine ‘Friendship Bracelet’ NV
The vibe: This month we’ve got not one but two (or three if you subscribe to the funky fourth bottle club) bottles from Margins Wine. Megan Bell has been a champion of natural wine in California for ten years and one of the first to openly acknowledge the headwinds facing independent, first-generation farmers and winemakers. She recently shared the sad news that Margins will be closing and this past harvest was her last. It’s an unfortunate reality and one that is affecting every indy winemaker at the moment. There are too many layers to unpack in a single club writeup but we encourage you to support small wineries by drinking their wine! This wine is especially easy to support since it goes down so so easy. Somewhere between a textural rosé and a very light red, this bottle drinks great with a chill and pairs shockingly well with seafood, from sushi to teriyaki salmon. From Megan: “This wine was named by our dear harvest intern Kathleen to commemorate the wonderful friendship we built during our time working harvest together. It was an immensely difficult season of both of our lives. And there was also much laughter, joy, learning, teamwork, acceptance of change, and beckoning of hope.”
The winemaker: Margins Wine is a small winemaking project of Megan Bell, a winemaker living and working in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Prior to settling on the central coast of California, Megan received her BS in Viticulture and Enology from UC Davis and apprenticed in wineries and vineyards in Napa, the Livermore Valley, the Willamette Valley, Central Otago (NZ), and the Loire Valley (France).
The geeky details: 34% Sagrantino, 30% Chenin blanc, 17% Mourvèdre, 10% Merlot, 9% Cabernet Franc. The Cabernet Franc and Merlot were destemmed and cofermented. The Sagrantino, Chenin, blanc, and Mourvèdre were destemmed and vinified separately, then all the cuvées were blended shortly before bottling.
Serve: With a light chill.
Food pairing: We paired this with a chirashi bowl and it…kinda worked great?! Tons of fruit upfront end with a quick lifted finish, refreshing the palate. Anything you’d drink a bright plum wine with, this is the wine.
Album pairing: Juando - Wind Flow
Margins Wine ‘Guardian Vital’ NV
The vibe: Megan Bell’s Margin Wines get their name from the underrepresented regions, vineyards and varietals they’re made from. Though this blend is made up of more household name varietals than some of her others, Guardian Vital speaks to the people behind the scenes that make wines like this possible. People living on the margins of society, often at risk of abuse and unsafe working conditions. Now more than ever, this wine highlights the reality the agricultural industry faces in a changing economic landscape. By buying wine you’re not only supporting the winemaker, you’re supporting a whole network of folks from harvest interns to tractor drivers. From Megan: “The Guardian Vital label is a new open-source label project (a la Brutal) in collaboration with Líderes Campesinas to raise awareness of vineyard workers' safety and rights. In order to gain permission to use this label, a strict checklist of both organic farming and responsible vineyard labor practices must be satisfied. Líderes Campesinas is an advocacy organization built “on the long legacy of women using organizing, outreach, and grassroots mobilization to improve the lives of farmworker communities.” They “organize to create healthier working conditions, safer environments, and engaged women leaders.” By drawing consumer attention to the inequities and lack of protections for vineyard workers, we can ignite conversations and enact meaningful change, inspiring a new era of labor rights in the wine industry.”
The winemaker: Margins Wine is a small winemaking project of Megan Bell, a winemaker living and working in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Prior to settling on the central coast of California, Megan received her BS in Viticulture and Enology from UC Davis and apprenticed in wineries and vineyards in Napa, the Livermore Valley, the Willamette Valley, Central Otago (NZ), and the Loire Valley (France).
The geeky details: 34% Grenache, 33% Cabernet Franc, 33% Merlot. The Cabernet Franc and Merlot were destemmed and cofermented. The Grenache was destemmed and vinified separately, then the two cuvées were blended shortly before bottling. The Cabernet Franc/Merlot was fermented on skins for five days and aged in neutral oak for eight months. The Grenache was fermented on skins for seven days and aged in neutral oak for 9.5 months.
Serve: With a light chill.
Food pairing: Put on this Anticuada record by Pantera Blue, seriously we’ll wait for it to start. Ok light a candle or two. Now we’re fancy. This album is good right? Setting the mood? Ok now are you hungry? Shoot, we forgot to tell you to put this bottle in the fridge ahead of time. Maybe you did anyway, but regardless it doesn’t need a huge chill. Just a light one. What were we talking about again? Oh yeah what’s for dinner? Honestly, this bottle is the Swiss Army knife of chilled reds - pick a protein (ideally something with some char or grilled goodness) and go to town. Or skip dinner and pair it with creme brûlée because my god doesn’t this album feel like that vibe? Bops on bops. Enjoy.
Album pairing: Pantera Blue - Anticuada
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WHAT THE FUNK?!
Margins Wine ‘Millefiori’ 2023
The vibe: This is another unconventional blending from Margins Wines that explores the deep end of the light red wine profile with tons of murky depth below the surface but somehow you float above it all like a flamingo floaty. From Megan: “I’ve been getting a lot of joy from creating unconventional blends over the last few years. It really is a privilege to get to play with tasting trials of different proportions of varietals that are not often blended together.”
The winemaker: Margins Wine is a small winemaking project of Megan Bell, a winemaker living and working in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Prior to settling on the central coast of California, Megan received her BS in Viticulture and Enology from UC Davis and apprenticed in wineries and vineyards in Napa, the Livermore Valley, the Willamette Valley, Central Otago (NZ), and the Loire Valley (France).
The geeky details: 50% Mourvèdre (San Benito County), 50% Merlot (Santa Clara Valley). 100% destemmed. Fermented and aged separately and blended right before bottling.
Serve: With a light chill.
Food pairing: This is a medium bodied red with a nervy twang, which is just wine speak for a red that hits a little more lifted than its body suggests. This blend is Rhone meets Bordeaux, so the classic French dishes would be the traditional way to go, or you could throw a smash burger at it. You know which one we’re going with.
Album pairing: Savana Funk - Behind the Eyes
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EASYYYY
Kobal Wine Blaufrankisch ‘Roots’ 2024
The vibe: New vintage Blaufrankisch from Kobal! We were lucky enough to host Spela Kobal herself last week for a winemaker tasting before we all scooted down to Portland for the Wild Bunch festival (which, highly recommend - where else can you try 400 wines in one sitting). We’ve been big fans of Spela and Bojan’s wines for the past couple years, and this ‘Roots’ Blaufrankisch is so good we had to put the new vintage in the club! This varietal is typically found in Austria, though thought to possibly be from Slovenia originally. It should age gracefully over the next five years, but it’s drinking beautifully right now and is the perfect dry red for these last few cold and damp days before spring sets in. Na zdravje!
The winemaker: Bojan and Spela Kobal produce wine in the Haloze appellation in Štajerska Slovenia, considered one of the top wine-growing sites in Europe since Roman times. Here, old vines root deep into marl slopes and absorb minerality, a signature profile of these wines. Kobal itself is a tiny garage winery, a project of Bojan’s outside of his day job as winemaker at Pullus (another fantastic Slovenian winery). He has a passion for indigenous varietals that rarely make their way out of the country, much less to our shores. Lucky us that their wines made it here!
The geeky details: 100% Blaufränkisch, hand-picked and de-stemmed, then skin macerated for 3 weeks. Spontaneous fermentation. Matured in used barrique barrels for 6 months where it finished malolactic fermentation. Bottled un-fined and unfiltered.
Serve: Cellar temp.
Food pairing: Open this up and let it breathe a little, it’ll open up nicely and come into its structure a bit. Dishes with a smoky, spicy or balsamic disposition will do well here. The classic Slovenian pairing would be sausage or dumplings!
Album pairing: Huw Marc Bennett - Tresilian Bay