Steering the winemaking at Bogle through three decades, Eric Aafedt continues to look forward with one of the more impactful sustainability initiatives of the year.
Eric Aafedt was just a teenager when he started moving irrigation lines and driving tractors for wineries in California’s Livermore Valley where he grew up. Today, after three decades of making wine for Bogle Family Vineyards, where he led the building of a cutting-edge facility in Clarksburg while developing a diverse lineup of brands, Aafedt is being honored with a Wine Star Award for Winemaker of the Year.
“We work closely together,” he says of the Bogle family and his mentor Chris Smith, the Director of Winegrowing who hired him in 1994. “It’s great to be in a family environment. We’re not corporate. We can be very reactive very quickly. I can walk down the hall to Warren and Ryan [Bogle]’s office and say, ‘What do you think, yea or nay?’ It makes for a very effective winery.”
A native of Pleasanton, Aafedt went from his teen days at Stony Ridge Winery to Concannon Vineyard, where he was encouraged to pursue higher education. Working at the winery on weekends and through the summers, he graduated with a degree in chemistry from Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, then found his way to the Bogles.
The family, which planted its first vines in 1968 and released its own brand a decade later, was then producing about 40,000 cases of wine annually. Under Aafedt’s direction, that amount skyrocketed,
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
