Tasting Room: Friday – Sunday, 1-6pm
Bottles for sale: Monday – Friday, 10-5pm
Donkey and Goat handcrafts their food focused wines in Berkeley with a less-is-more approach from sustainably grown grapes in the Sierra Nevada, Anderson Valley, Mendocino Ridge and more. The wines boast savory notes, earth driven minerality and bright acidity that are best enjoyed with food and friends. Their tasting room is inside the winery.
In 2001, Tracey and Jared Brandt left the tech world to work in France for Eric Texier in the Rhone Valley. It was there that they learned "natural" winemaking - a philosophy that uses organically or biodynamically farmed grapes, minimal or no sulfur, natural yeast that occurs in the air, no additives (there are 60 that can be added to wine and not listed on an ingredients label), and is generally "non-interventionist". It is rarely filtered, and never heat/cool stabilized.
In an about-face from their previous 21st century careers, Jared and Tracey opened a winery, embarking on an enterprise with one of the longest histories in existence. Pioneers in the American natural wine movement, they don't even use plastic bins which are ubiquitous in wineries, opting instead to use concrete, clay, or wood.
They founded Donkey and Goat in 2004 and are now located in what is known as the hub for natural wine in downtown West Berkeley, where no less than five wineries (all with tasting rooms) have joined them, all espousing a similar philosophy and all banking on the synergy of having kindred spirits close-by. True to their French education, they produce several Rhone varietals, but check out the website for a broad assortment of wines of all colors that taste "alive".