01
We farm for flavour, not for tonnage
Cover crops between every row, sheep through the winter, and no synthetic herbicide anywhere on the property. Yields sit around two tons to the acre, which is about half what this ground could carry.
Alexander Valley · Sonoma County
Slow hills, long light, honest wine.
Eighty-four acres, farmed by one family since 1974. We make about four thousand cases a year — roughly as much as we can taste properly ourselves.
◆ 96 points — Wine Spectator
◆ Top 100 Wineries 2024 — Vinous
◆ Certified Organic since 2019
◆ 97 points — Decanter
◆ Fifty-one consecutive vintages
◆ Dry-farmed hillside fruit
Who we are
We are not trying to make the biggest wine in the valley. We are trying to make the one that still tastes like this hillside in twenty years.
Henri Solène bought eighty-four acres of failing prune orchard in 1974 because the soil was thin and nobody else wanted it. Thin soil, it turns out, is the whole point. His daughter Marielle runs the cellar now, and the wines have only got quieter and more precise.
Read our story
51
Vintages
The estate
Thin soil, steep ground, and a great deal of patience.
The hillside blocks sit on fractured shale under no more than a foot of red clay. We stopped irrigating them in 2011 and lost a third of the crop that year. Six vintages later the roots had found their way twelve feet down, and the wines had found a depth we could not have bought.
84
Acres farmed
12
Blocks, picked separately
4100cs
Made each year
100%
Estate grown
Current releases
Nine wines, and not one of them made to a formula.
From vine to bottle
Four decisions that make the wine.
02
We pick by block, in the dark
Twelve blocks, twelve separate picks, most of them starting at three in the morning while the fruit is still cold. Nothing is blended until we have tasted every lot on its own.
03
We ferment with what is already there
Native yeast, open-top fermenters for the reds, and punch-downs by hand twice a day. It is slower and less predictable, and it is the reason the wines smell like a place rather than a process.
04
We wait longer than is commercially sensible
Most reds spend sixteen to twenty-two months in barrel and another year in bottle before release. The Solstice Reserve waits four. Nothing leaves the cellar because the calendar says so.
Visit the estate
Come and sit with it for an afternoon.
Every tasting here is seated and hosted, usually by someone who farmed the block you are drinking. No standing at a bar, no queue, and nobody trying to sell you a case before you have finished the first pour.
In good company
What people say when they get home.
From the journal