Sonoma Wineries Not Enough People Have Heard Of

We asked a simple question. Which Sonoma winery has not had enough people walk through it. Thirty answers came back in a day, and almost none of them were the names you see on a billboard off the 101.

That is the whole value of this list. Nobody nominated a place because it buys advertising. They nominated the room where somebody had a good afternoon.

The ones that came up first

Donum draws people for the sculpture collection and keeps them for the Pinot. Bartholomew Estate sits on some of the oldest continuously planted ground in the county. Scribe turned a hacienda and a hillside into the kind of place people describe for years afterward. Iron Horse pours sparkling wine outdoors with a view down the Green Valley that does most of the persuading.

Then the deeper cuts. Purple Pachyderm, Square Peg, Talisman, Auteur, Croix. Small operations, mostly Pinot and Chardonnay from Russian River fruit, mostly run by people who will be standing in the room when you arrive.

What they have in common

Very little, which is the point. Dehlinger has been quietly excellent since the 1970s. Smith Story started with a Kickstarter and a German shepherd on the label. Benziger farms biodynamically on Sonoma Mountain. Limerick Lane makes Zinfandel that argues with everything you assume about Zinfandel.

The connective tissue is not style or price. It is that each one got named by somebody who wanted more people to find it.

Every winery here is on Spill with hours, tasting details and whether you can walk in. Start anywhere. The list was built by people who had already done the driving.

How to actually use a list this long

Thirty is too many for one trip and that is fine. The list is a filter, not a route. Pick a corner of the county and take three from it.

Russian River and Green Valley hold the largest cluster here, so Longboard, Limerick Lane, Iron Horse, Square Peg, Purple Pachyderm and Dehlinger can be strung together without much driving. Sonoma Valley and Carneros give you Donum, Bartholomew, Muscardini, Talisman and Larson. Dry Creek and Healdsburg cover Smith Story and De La Montanya.

What underrated actually meant here

Nobody used the word cheap. A few of these are expensive and several are hard to get into. Underrated meant under-visited, which is a different complaint, and usually a geography problem rather than a quality one. Places a few minutes off the main road get skipped by people working from a list somebody handed them at a hotel.

That is the gap this fills.

More in this guide