First and foremost, we hope you are all well and finding small things you can celebrate each day.
Brian and I are using this moment to look back a bit and remember how far we’ve come. All of us here at big table farm hope this letter is a little treat in your day.
And to that end, we bring you Rosé!
A note from the winemaker
The 2022 bottling marks our 15th vintage of producing Laughing Pig Rosé! Our first vintage making this wine was 2007. That year was a rainy one and our first working with Oregon-grown grapes. As a new winery, I wanted to come out of the gate strong and making a great rosé (vs. a questionable pinot noir) seemed like the right decision at that moment. I arranged to buy one ton of pinot noir, and many winemakers were using Saignée to make the best pinot they could. I too used this juice by putting it over the fruit, then letting the ferment begin.
I was aiming to make a rosé that I wanted to drink: dry, malolactic complete, bottled without fining or filtration, and one that would stand up to food while also being delicious on its own. The fruit was pressed and went into four neutral barrels, where it completed fermentation and malolactic. The Rosé lived in these barrels until June, probably when we scraped together enough money to buy glass and corks and labels. We gathered some friends to help, and bottled and labeled those first 105 cases over one long day. We took the front seat out of another friend’s truck so we could send 20 cases in air conditioning down to California that July.
We sold almost all of it by the time the financial crisis really took hold, which was good news since we needed cash to bottle our 2006 Syrah we made the previous vintage. If we had made Pinot in 2007, we would have been a new winery trying to sell in an extremely difficult marketplace - so my decision to only make Rosé was fortuitous on many levels.
The 2008 vintage was small by comparison and it didn’t make sense to make a rosé that year, so we made our first Oregon Pinots- 75 cases of our Willamette Valley Pinot Noir and 100 cases of Resonance Vineyard Pinot Noir (that is a story for another time!) The 2009 vintage was another large one and using Saignée again made sense. This process shaped our rosé for a second time and we have continued to make this wine consistently every vintage since. Its release marks the beginning of spring for us, and it is a house favorite until it’s all gone sometime in September. As always, it’s bottled without any fining or filtration after spending 5-6 months in neutral barrels.
The label was inspired many years before that first wine was made, during a family trip to Ireland. Clare and I visited a small farm with piglets, and she jumped in their pen to give them some love and scratches. I took a picture with a small novel digital camera, and she did a quick sketch afterwards that lived in our kitchen for years – with the idea it someday might become a wine label. Obviously, it has stood the test of time and still brings us joy so many years later!
The 2022 Laughing Pig is delicious! This beautiful dry rosé has high-toned strawberry and cherry, that is balanced with a soft yet impressive richness on the palate. The full tasting notes are on our web site. It’s always the first wine released of a vintage, so it is always special - we are so happy to be able to keep trotting it out!
Thank you for supporting our dream, so we can continue to bring wines to your table.
Spring Wines, Earth Pinot Noir and the Elusive Queen Chardonnay
If you have already bought our spring release wines, thank you. We are grateful to feel so connected to you all and hope you will find something in our current offerings that fits your table and budget. And please keep reaching out via email, phone and social media from wherever your table is in the world!
The Earth and Queen allocations have been sent out, so check your inbox. Please let us know if you have enjoyed that wine in the past but somehow didn’t get an allocation. We are offering up what’s left to our waitlist next week, so please let us know if you’d like to be on that list by emailing anna@bigtablefarm.com
Meat from the Farm
If you live locally, we will be opening up a few more spots on our meat share list this year. In the recent past, our beef, pork, goat and lamb meat has been in small quantities that were all spoken for. We will be harvesting a bit more beef and lamb this year, so if you are interested in procuring some of this beautiful high-quality, 100% grass-fed beef and lamb from big table farm, please send me a note at clare @ bigtablefarm.com (local residents only please).
We are continuing to do our best to see each day as an opportunity to make art, take care of the land and enjoy life. Thank you so much for buying, drinking and sharing our wines. We are humbled and honored to be part of your daily meals and celebrations alike!
Cheers - Clare, Brian, Anna, Laura, Josh and Riley
** a note on ordering wine - If you're super busy - please let us help you order wine in whatever way is EASIEST for YOU! We are happy to assist. Call, email - We are available to make sure you get the wines you love! If you want to reach out please just send an email to admin@bigtablefarm.com or call 503-852-3097 or Text Clare Directly! 503-922-3540 and we'll follow up with YOU and get your order. You can also Click here to go right to the buy wine page
If you don't follow me on Instagram you might enjoy doing so. As all the development projects and baby animals all continue to grow on the farm, I will continue to post all the spring farm happenings, recipes and what’s happing in the winery @bigtablefarm
ps - you can also follow new paintings @clarecarver and www.clarecarver.com
