While some California grape growers are enduring tough times, one business on the Lodi wine trail is making a name for itself with a unique offering: the chance to mingle with its bearded, horned residents.
Spenker Family Farm provides seasonal meet-and-greets and year-round viewing of its four-legged ambassadors — goats that produce the milk that goes into the farm’s cheese.
Adding cheesemaking to an established winery is one example of how innovative vintners are finding ways to adapt to a changing market.
“We joke in our family that we are about five or 10 years ahead” of trends, said Sarah Spenker Pratt, who runs the farm with sister Kate Spenker and parents Chuck and Bettyann Spenker. “We knew the cheese business is something that would enhance and really stand out.”
The Spenkers aren’t the only ones adding new features to their vineyards and tasting rooms while weathering a wine crisis that is already resulting in bankruptcy filings. Travel + Leisure magazine notes that some wineries are adding hikes, bicycling, fly fishing, fitness classes and zip lining to their wine-tasting experiences.
But the Spenkers are unique in combining an up-close farm animal experience with a chance to sample cheeses that the herd produces, alongside wine flights.
Adding a herd of goats to a grape-growing farm is one way that four generations of Spenkers have pivoted to take advantage of trends in agriculture for more than a century.
Chuck Spenker said the farm began under his grandfather, who bought it in 1902. He said he remembers that in the early days, there was a diversity of crops and farm animals, both growing up on the farm. Tomatoes and alfalfa were among the early crops, and at one point, the Spenkers were growing watermelons. The barnyard included sheep, pigs, cows and — you guess it — goats.
But by the mid-1980s, the Spenkers were focusing mostly on bulk grapes that, like those of many growers in Lodi, were shipped to outside wineries. Chuck Spenker met Bettyann, a high school chemistry teacher, and together they became interested in developing their own winery.
“It was may dad’s dream,” Pratt said. “They wanted to make wine on a commercial level.”
And so they did. Soon, Wine Spectator magazine, the influential publication that guides the tastes of oenophiles, gave the farm’s zinfandel the highest score any wine in the area had achieved, Chuck Spenker said.
That was a breakthrough at a time when coastal vineyards in places like Sonoma and Mendocino dominated the state’s wine market.
“Lodi was just considered hot and flat,” he said.
Then came Bettyann’s interest in goats. It started with a pair in 2010, about the time her daughters had gone off to college.
“My mom always dreams like, ‘Well, if I am going to live on a farm, I want farm animals.’ ” Pratt said.
Once the goats arrived, the work began. For starters, the Spenkers had to learn how to milk them. (Later, automated milking equipment would solve that problem issue.)
And then there was the matter of converting the milk into cheese. That was a scientific challenge that Bettyann successfully tackled.
“She started making cheese because she loved the science of fermentation on the wine side,” Pratt said. It was the idea that “cheese is another kind of fermentation process, and you know, wine and cheese go together.”
Bettyann first started giving away the cheese to friends, who implored her to start selling it more widely.
By 2018, the Spenkers had built a creamery. They believe it is the only one in San Joaquin County that turns goat milk into cheese.
“The wine scene had exploded,” Pratt said, and the creamery was “a new way to put some energy into the business.”
Today, the cheese is sold at the farm as well as at local farmers markets. The Spenkers have created a whole line, from Delta Breeze aged goat cheese to — for this time of year — Pumpkin Cheesecake chevre.
These days, Pratt said people will come to the farm just to see the goats. She and her sister have created events around them, including goat yoga.
They started yoga offerings in 2017 thinking it would get people excited about the farm’s dairy project, and it’s continued since.
They have an instructor who “teaches this nice, easy yoga flow, and we just have all the baby goats wandering around,” Pratt said. Some nap, others crawl on laps and some jump on practitioners’ backs.
“They are all a little mischievous, but they are all loving creatures,” she said. For example, the Spenkers are careful to warn guests that the goats will try to munch on their hair. Once, a goat pulled out a woman’s hair extensions, to the amusement of everyone, including the guest.
Apparently, the Spenkers can’t get enough of goats. The farm is on its way to having produced about 1,000 kids, as baby goats are called.
For a goat, it’s a pretty good life.
That’s another way of saying that on this farm, no goat ever has a b-a-a-a-d time.