This week is the time to open bottles that pay tribute to our maternal heroes! From celebratory bubbles to wines with a slightly more sentimental meaning, we share with you our favorite mom-inspired bottles.

We’re also very excited for this week’s featured content, an interview with Cooper Allebrand and Niko Comati from Alamati Wine. Discover how they started their own label, plus their go-to karaoke song below 👇

Interview with Alamati Wine

The afternoon after an extremely successful Alamati Wine launch party, we met Cooper Allebrand and Niko Comati. The aforementioned launch party included community artists, business owners, and musicians and was a shining example of what Alamati Wine is all about. They warmly invited us into Cooper’s Santa Barbara home, where we were greeted by a goooood boy named Reuben. It was a cozy space with all the signs that a winemaker was inhabiting it: varietal poster on the wall and a full wine fridge. It was the perfect setting to get to know the two winemakers, their brand, and their wine tale that started with a 4th grade talent show. Enjoy.

Q: Can you start us off by walking us through how the idea for Alamati Wine was started and how you two got involved in the wine industry?

Niko: I was working at a ranch and vineyard in Paso Robles that had sheep and cattle for sustainable rotational grazing. I then started helping them in the cellar as a side gig. One afternoon I was walking through the vineyards with the owner and thought, “This is a cool way to live.” Being able to farm your own land, take care of it, and utilize animals to take care of the soil properly.

I remember calling Cooper [Niko’s childhood best friend] on the way home and saying we should look into the wine industry and we had no idea where that would go but we were kind of entranced by it. Cooper was on the East Coast at the time so we thought about how can we create something in this world, whether it was the farming side, the winemaking side, or somewhere in between. I ended up working a couple winery jobs in Italy and New Zealand, and then COVID hit. Once Cooper was back in town he ended up getting into the industry by working with Ernst Storm over at Storm wines. [Coincidentally also featured in today’s issue!]

Q: Give us a little more background on the vineyards and land you’re sourcing grapes from. Where is it and how did you choose it?

Cooper: With both of us back home in Santa Barbara, we started to try to set up contracts to procure our own grapes. We ended up meeting Louis Lucas from Lucas & Lewellen vineyards. He showed us around his vineyards, and we developed a deep, personal relationship with him. He farms some smaller little lots that he's able to be more personal with, and is producing some really good fruit from his own home block which is called Valley View.

Louis has control over all final farming practices. But we can go and provide input like, “Hey, can we stop watering at this point for more concentration in the fruit?” We can go walk the vineyards and take samples, run analysis on them to see that we're approaching ideal acid levels and sugar levels, and also analyze what the actual fruit tastes like.

Having that personal relationship and being able to talk to him directly has been so beneficial as far as learning exactly what's happening with the vineyards day to day, especially during harvest. We're trying to make our picking decisions, which is one of our most important decisions, based on all of these things. If we didn’t have that relationship and we were in the dark, that’d be much more difficult to do and result in a lower quality wine.

Q: Alamati produces some untraditional varietals for Santa Barbara County. How did you land on the specific set of varietals you ended up producing?