Planted by hand in 1978. Worked by the same family ever since. Certified organic since 2011, dry-farmed since the beginning.
My parents bought this land in October of 1978 with money they had saved for an apartment in San Francisco. They were thirty-one and twenty-nine. Neither of them had grown anything more demanding than a tomato. My father had been an architect; my mother a high-school Latin teacher. What they had was a stubborn belief that California, given enough patience, could make wine in the old, restrained European way. And a thirty-year mortgage.
They planted Pinot Noir the next spring because everyone told them not to. The first commercial vintage we considered honest was 1984. By the time I left for UC Davis in '91, my father was making roughly four hundred cases a year and selling all of it to a handful of restaurants in San Francisco who had taken a chance on him.
I came home in 2008. My father had been ill that summer and he asked me to take over the cellar. He gave me one piece of advice the day he handed me the keys: "Make the wine the vineyard wants to make. Not the wine the magazines want this year." I have tried, in seventeen vintages since, to honor that.
My son Sam now manages the vineyard, which is mostly the same forty acres we started with, plus a small block of Syrah we put in on the upper bench in 2009. We are still dry-farmed. We have been certified organic since 2011. We still make about eight thousand cases a year, and we sell most of them to the same wine club members and restaurants who have been with us for ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years.
We are not trying to grow. We are trying to keep doing this well. For one more generation, and then another. Thank you for taking an interest in the wines.
The vines have never been irrigated. Roots reach twelve to fifteen feet to find moisture, which makes for smaller berries, lower yields, and a far more concentrated expression of the bench itself. It is harder, slower, and more honest than the alternative.
Every fermentation begins with the yeast that arrives on the fruit. We do not add commercial cultures, enzymes, or color. The wines are bottled when they have settled clear in barrel. Usually somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four months. And never before.
Eight thousand cases is a small number on purpose. In short vintages we make less. In strong vintages we still make eight thousand. The estate is the ceiling. Not the demand from the wait list.
The estate sits at 320–510 feet of elevation on a southwest-facing bench above Westside Road, four miles south of Healdsburg. Goldridge sandy loam over fractured shale. Pacific fog rolls in nightly through the Petaluma Gap.
"We were told Pinot would not ripen here. We planted it anyway. Took six harvests before we made a wine I would have served a guest. But the vines knew the place better than we did."
"My father taught me to leave the wine alone. The vineyard is doing the work. My job, mostly, is to not get in its way. And to know when the wine is finished telling me what it wants to be."
"My grandparents planted vines we are still farming. That is the timescale we plan in. Cover crops, owl boxes, no irrigation, no synthetic anything. The land has to outlast all of us."
Eleanor Marsh has quietly become one of the most thoughtful Pinot Noir winemakers on the West Coast. Her wines transmit the cool Russian River bench with unusual fidelity.
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