Similar to our approach with our Three Sons Cuvee Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, we hoped to create a signature blend of vineyards to represent the Sonoma Coast. We introduced the Three Sons in 2003, but awaited until 2006 to introduce its Sonoma Coast brother.

For Hillside Cuvee, we sourced vineyards close to the Halleck Vineyard Estate,…

The Haas Vineyard is really not named, as such. It’s a modest, two-acre Pinot Noir vineyard behind an equally modest home near Glen Ellen on the eastern foot of Sonoma Mountain. It’s currently owned by Peter and Ginny Haas, but we had purchased fruit from this site through two previous owners.

I met Pete some years ago after the first harvest since he had purchased the property….

The Farm Vineyards was the first vineyard in our neighborhood from which we purchased fruit to make Pinot Noir.

In 2003, after being judged #1 Pinot in the United States, we needed to make more wine than our Estate Grown Pinot Noir could support. Greg Lafollette, our winemaker, started combing the countryside and met Ben and George,…

When we planted our Estate Pinot Noir Vineyard in 1993, our goals were not lofty.

There had never been a vineyard planted in western Sebastopol, all the way to the coast. We were the first, and we began without a clue what we were doing. We purchased the rootstock from the Yellow Pages.

We thought it would be beautiful,…

I was introduced Gewurztraminer in, of all places, Kenya in the 1970s. I lived in Kenya as a young man. It had been a British Colony just a decade earlier.

India had also been a British Colony, a relatively short hop across the Indian Ocean. As part of the British Empire, Indian businessmen were the “merchant class” in Kenya….

European semi-sweet wines were the rage in the 1970s. Blue Nun, a German Liebfroumilch, was a fave. Mateus Rosé from Portugal was the most popular wine in the world.

At the same time, a new entrant, White Zinfandel wine, joined the ranks of American wines made by Sutter Home.

Sutter Home employed a winemaking technique called “saignée,” draining some of the free-run juice from Zinfandel to create a concentrated,…