Dear Friend,

Each year on Mother’s Day, when we all celebrate the very special and powerfully important women who have touched our lives and have helped shaped us and our families, I am always thinking about Caroline. She is the unheralded hero within our family and business, successfully raising two beautiful boys while also co-managing our winery and navigating the trials and tribulations of life as an entrepreneur with grace.

I obviously also think about my mom, Karen Bergström, who has worked very hard alongside my father as they raised us during their many wonderful years in medical practice together, and then as they set out to create a new family paradigm by moving out to the Dundee Hills and planting a vineyard. Little did they know, now 25 years ago, that they were also planting a new acorn that would grow the roots of our family tree in the wine community at the Ekollon house on the Bergström Vineyard! I think about my sisters and my sisters-in-law and the wonderful families that they have created. We are blessed with many strong women in our midst.

But if it was not for Sigrid, my father’s mother, none of us would be here today telling this tale and farming this land and enjoying these wines. Sigrid raised my father in a northern Swedish agricultural village where they farmed potatoes, tended to animals, fished, hunted, and logged frozen forests. She was a telephone operator and raised a family during some very tough times post World War II. She reluctantly said goodbye to her 17-year-old son as he boarded a steamboat in Oslo, Norway with visions of the new world in his head. She would only see him again in person fewer than 15 times during her lifetime before her passing in 2006. Her sacrifice allowed my father to create a first-generation American family that is now three generations large!

When my father and I traveled back to Sweden, amidst the harvest of 2006 for Sigrid’s funeral, I knew that we would dedicate a wine to this very special, powerful, and compassionate woman who somehow miraculously was able to still meet and know and love three generations of Bergström children. With Chardonnay’s delicate dichotomy between grace and power, I knew that it had to be this varietal that would pay homage to her life and her mothering of our founder John Bergström who, thanks to her, was able to achieve the American dream as an immigrant to this country. We will always be grateful for her sacrifice as a mom.

On this Mother’s Day, we celebrate the compassionate, loving, and powerful women and mothers in our family by releasing the latest vintage of Sigrid Chardonnay, the exquisite 2018, and by opening a bottle or two of Sigrid Chardonnay. We hope that you will do the same too!

– Josh Bergström