LBH007: Feral Winemaking
Hosted by Learning By Hand & Feral Ecology
Get Tickets
Welcome! Please choose your desired ticket type:
About Event
This is a 3-part, seasonal hands-on course where we’ll go from foraging our own fruit and cultivating wild yeast to fermenting and bottling our very own wine!
You’ll leave with a deeper connection to the local urban ecology, hands-on skills in foraging and fermentation, and several bottles of wine to share with friends & family! This will be a guided community process of learning, play and experimentation, with a classroom portion to give everyone a solid foundation.
The goal is to help you walk away with the knowledge and confidence to keep fermentation alive in your own kitchen—and inspired to engage with the abundance of wild foods growing all around us.
Your teachers:
Daniel Goldberg is a winemaker (Feral Ecology), crafting natural wines, meads, and ciders at the Richmond Wine Collective. His work centers on wild-foraged ingredients—loquats, wild plums, prickly pear, mushrooms, and plants—gathered from the local woods and urban edges of the Bay Area. A first-generation American of Eastern European Jewish ancestry, Daniel has lived on Ohlone land for the past 12 years. He approaches foraging+fermentation as a container for joy, grief, gratitude, and reconnection—a pathway toward more integral relationships with the earth and one another.
Maryfairy has been making wine out of fruit for 20 years. She enjoys growing, picking, fermenting and drinking. Mary makes condiments and sells them at the Planting Justice Farmers Market in El Sobrante as Big Grin Small Batch.
This course is put on in partnership with Learning By Hand (LBH), a collaborative education project providing practical skillbuilding in group settings. LBH seeks to build effective models of creative facilitation, community design, arts education, traditional ecological knowledge practices, and continued learning. LBH welcomes the spectrum of human identities and sees the intrinsic value of all perspectives. We are engaged in the learning process alongside our community and encourage an openness rooted in care and humility. Visit us at https://learningbyhand.org
🍷🍇 Workshop Breakdown: 🍷🍑
Session 1 (Sunday July 20)
MORNING 10a-1p: wild winemaking and fermentation comprehensive crash course; make your wild yeast starter to take home; tasting of Feral Ecology wines
AFTERNOON 2-6p: Fruit harvest & crush on-site, learning the tools of the trade
Session 2 (Sunday July 27, 12-6pm)
Fruit press and move wine into fermenting vessels. A talk + tasting + discussion with Maryfairy.
Session 3 (Sunday, September 7th, date can be moved based on class availability)
Bottling our wines, potluck meal, and a tour of the Richmond wine collective winery, where 20+ artisanal natural winemakers work!
(Session 3 is only open to those who are attending previous classes, this is where folks will be taking their wine home with them.)
We highly encourage folks to sign up for the whole series. This is the kind of “teach a person to fish” opportunity that can spark a lifelong practice.
**Kids free.
**Feel free to come and go as needed if you can't stay for each day's full class length.