Boeger Winery

From Friday through Sunday the brick oven is lit at 1709 Carson Road. Boeger Brick Oven serves wood-fired pizza alongside the wine, and on Friday nights it has stayed open until 8. The tasting room has indoor seating and a deli case of picnic food, and it opens onto gardens, a redwood grove, a pond, and tables set among orchard trees. The winery takes no reservations. Dogs and children are welcome, visitors may bring their own food, and a tasting is six wines of the visitor’s choosing for $12. Staff will say where to walk in the vineyards.

The place calls itself Boeger Winery & Farmworks. The second half of the name covers tea, flowers, botanicals, fruit, and produce. The winery says everything it serves is family-produced and poured into vessels made by local artists, and that its staff work in every part of the farm, “from planting to preparing.”

Pizza, tea, and the Old Cellar Bar

Below the 1872 Fossati-Lombardo house, which was once the family’s home and wine cellar, the downstairs stone room is open to the public to “chill,” in the winery’s word. It has fieldstone walls, wood beams, and soft lighting. On some nights it runs as the Old Cellar Bar, “like the speakeasy it used to be during prohibition,” according to a 2026 post from the winery. That summer the cellar also served blooming tea made from estate flowers and botanicals, French press coffee, and fig leaf iced matcha on weekends. It added a mocha iced with mint from the creek, made with Alpen Sierra coffee and ceremonial-grade cacao and sweetened with a syrup of rose or of Sweet Everlasting. The winery says the Sweet Everlasting syrup smells like maple. The Farmworks infusions, wine mixed daily with whatever estate botanicals are growing, were rose and Sweet Everlasting flowers on one July day. The cellar also held its first Comedy in the Cellar night.

The Friday Night Music Series plays on the grounds every other Friday. Bands in 2026 included Cedar Exchange, Manzanita, Hither and Yon, and Vices to Virtues, which played at noon on the Fourth of July while children used the orchard sandbox. The last music of the 2026 season was September 18. The winery’s calendar lists an annual Fall Festival in November, with dates not yet set, and Cork It!, a winter barrel tasting on January 23 and 24.

Forge, kiln, and orchard

A working blacksmith shop on the grounds opens to visitors on Thursdays and Saturdays. A ceramics studio makes the vessels the food and drink are served in. The farm sells grapevine wreaths, herbal teas, culinary and medicinal herbs, and wildcrafted goods, and the winery announced dried flowers for August 2026. The orchard has a sandbox with toys, corn-hole, grass, and a creek where children watch frogs. The winery promotes birdwatching and wildlife photography among the vines, and one of its posts says only: “Don’t feed the wildlife.”

The winery cat answers to Earl Grey, Grisito, and, according to the winery, Amuse Bouche “when he’s sassy.” After one long Saturday during the Apple Hill season he caught a mouse outside the tasting room. The winery reported that the catch drew “mixed reviews from customers.”

Harvest 2026 and the old vines

Boeger works 80 acres and thirty-three grape varieties, with an emphasis on Italian and Spanish ones, according to the El Dorado Winery Association, which names Greg and Justin Boeger as the farming and winemaking team. The 2026 harvest started earlier than usual. Early-season weather made the crop light, though the winery called the fruit quality “great.” The first week went to crushing Primitivo for the rosé. The winery planned a low-alcohol Glou from Tempranillo and a Barbera piquette. In September it led ticketed harvest tours that tasted newly fermented rosé, walked the vineyards, and finished in the historic cellar with wine and pizza bites.

The original Glou is a Refosco Novello made in the Beaujolais nouveau style and sold only in the tasting room. Clare Kessler, the winemaker, calls it “a fruity, vibrant porch-sipper!” In a 2026 post the winery says she argued for Graciano as “the next darling wine.” Wade McKinley, of the staff, picks the Negroamaro as “my unwind, anytime, all the time wine.” The newer Farmworks label series, which includes the rosés, the Glou, and a 2025 Pinot Gris, carries a watercolor by Lexi Boeger of Queen Anne’s Lace, the wild carrot that blooms between the vine rows in summer.

Some of the vines go back to the founding. Greg Boeger planted Flora in the 1970s. Dr. Harold Olmo created the grape at UC Davis in 1938 by crossing Gewürztraminer and Sémillon. Those old head-pruned vines still bear, and their fruit goes into Hangtown Gold, a blend with Sémillon, Riesling, and Muscat Canelli. Older still are the heirloom Italian plums along the creek. The winery says the Ticinese family who homesteaded the farm in the late 1800s planted them, and that they are what remains of terraced gardens built along the water. Figs from the same plantings ripen nearby. In season the tasting room sells the plums with Ya Li Asian pears, Bartlett pears, pumpkins, gourds, and corn.

Lombardo Ranch, or Fossati’s Winery

The family the winery credits with that orchard appears in the record as Fossati and Lombardo. A 2017 Mountain Democrat account, drawn from El Dorado County Farm Bureau records, says the Fossati-Lombardo family homesteaded the land during the Gold Rush. They tried the gold fields first and found more money in selling goods and services to miners. The estate became a fruit and nut farm, a winery, and a distillery. Greg Boeger told California Grown that wine was made on the property from 1860 to 1920, after which it was converted to pears.

The same newspaper printed two old photographs. One, taken in 1886, shows wine grapes and the building that is now Boeger Winery. The other shows Giovanni Napoleon Lombardo with his wife Candida and their daughter Sarah, who holds young Charles Fossati, at the winery on Carson Road, with the old tasting room behind them.

The National Park Service lists the property as Lombardo Ranch, National Register number 77000292, published September 30, 1977. The listing gives 1860 and 1872 as the significant years and names Giovanni Lombarde as architect. The topographic sheet filed with the nomination labels the site “Lombardo Ranch, Fossati’s Winery.” Alan Tangren photographed the winery and the distillery from several sides in January and February 1977. The file also includes a copy of an 1886 view of the winery from the northwest, made from original prints credited to a Fossati at 1571 Carson Road.

A pear ranch in 1972

By the time the Boegers arrived, the county had long been pear country. Greg Boeger puts the peak at 1959, with 5,000 acres of pears. The Mountain Democrat says disease and overproduction ended the county’s pear business in the early 1960s, and that growers turned to apples, forming the Apple Hill Growers Association in 1964.

Greg had grown up around wine. His grandfather, Anton Nichelini, founded the Nichelini Winery in Napa in 1890, and Greg worked its vineyard as a boy. He studied viticulture and agricultural economics at UC Davis and worked about 18 months for the USDA. The county Agricultural Commissioner and Farm Advisor then helped him find a property. In 1972 he and Sue Boeger bought a pear ranch from a fifth-generation farming family. The winery’s account says this came decades after Prohibition closed the county’s last winery, and that Boeger became the first post-Prohibition winery in what is now the El Dorado AVA. Visit El Dorado calls it the oldest commercial winery in the county.

Greg kept farming pears while he planted vines on the open ground. He leased a small winery elsewhere until he built his own on the ranch in 1974, and then phased out the pears. When the Boegers started, he said, the county had 6 acres of grapes. Forty-five years later it had more than 60 wineries and 2,300 acres. He also planted lesser-known varieties, including Carignane, Refosco, Charbono, and Aglianico. Barbera has been a focus since 1975. The winery says its Barbera has won hundreds of awards. Visit El Dorado counts more than 120 medals, including several “Best Barbera of California” titles at the California State Fair. In 2018 the State Fair gave Greg Boeger its Wine Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2017 he said his son had become the winemaker while he ran the vineyards. He restores old tractors and puts them to work in the fields, and the vines are monitored with neutron probes so they get only the water they need. Asked what he found most rewarding, Greg answered: “We have a very hilly terrain and getting on top of the hill and looking out and seeing the vineyard healthy and growing is very satisfying.”