David Hirsch planted his vineyard beginning in 1980 on a ridge overlooking the Pacific at Fort Ross on the extreme Sonoma Coast — 1,400 feet of elevation, three miles from the ocean, uplifted seabed soils with gravelly loam and varying degrees of clay. He started with some Riesling. Then a mentor told him: “If you plant Pinot Noir here, you’ll be famous.” He got cuttings of the best Oregon clones and went to work. He has been growing for Williams Selyem since 1994.
This is an extreme site. Rainfall averages eighty inches in winter. Summers are dry except when the fog comes in. Temperature swings are wide, winds are significant, and the climate shifts week to week and season to season. None of that is a complaint — it is the point. The stress and variation that would ruin a lesser site produce something singular here. Hirsch Pinot Noir carries the coast in every glass.
David Hirsch is a man of few words. He would rather be in the vineyard than talking about it. That disposition and the fruit it produces are entirely consistent with each other — specific, unadorned, and shaped by one of the most demanding growing environments in California. Three decades of working this ground together have produced some of the most celebrated vineyard-designate Pinot Noir in the Williams Selyem portfolio.
