Winemaking

Today, Burt Williams is seen as a brilliant nonconformist who thought outside the box. The truth is that he started using mid-century milk tanks to ferment his wines simply because they were there. As the Sonoma dairy industry declined in the 1970s, the region was rife with high-grade, double-walled stainless-steel tanks, with bulletproof welding and nowhere to go.

Our cellar is built around gravity flow. For blending and barrel transfers, we rely on dome-topped stainless steel vessels. More often found in breweries, these tanks run at higher pressure, allowing for wine to be transferred with inert gas instead of pumps. It is an unconventional choice, but the softer handling helps preserve texture, nuance, and balance in the finished wines.

Antique stainless-steel dairy tanks are still at the center of our process. Wide, shallow, open-topped and temperature controlled, they are ideal for foot treading, allowing gentle extraction and precise fermentations. No longer produced, they are prized for their functionality and longevity. Jeff Mangahas continues to collect these antique vessels for the Fermentation House, taking the hunt to farms as far away as Pennsylvania Amish country.

Our address has changed a couple of times since Burt and Ed’s garage days. Today, Jeff Mangahas works from a modern facility near downtown Healdsburg, purpose-built to give him precise control over every detail of the élévage process. Barrels then age at our Russian River Valley Estate before we bottle our wines onsite. The scale may be different than it was in our garage days, but the mentality is exactly the same.

Our latest chapter with the Faiveley family brings us full circle. Burt’s earliest wines were compared to a fine Nuits-Saint-Georges—the very village where the Faiveleys have been making wine since 1825—and their admiration for Williams Selyem ran deep long before we joined forces. It’s a natural progression in a legacy spanning three devoted owners, grounded in a shared belief in balance over excess. Both wineries follow many of the same Burgundian practices, including partial whole-cluster fermentations and no fining or filtering. When it comes to cooperage, we speak the same language, as well: Combined, we are Tonnellerie François Frères’s largest customer.

Our proprietary yeast culture was born in 1984, when a single Zinfandel barrel finished a difficult fermentation cleanly and with exceptional texture. We have preserved our “Mother” ever since, painstakingly re-growing it each year in our Fermentation House laboratory from a single cell, much like a sourdough starter. Nurturing her is a job that both the harvest crew and our biologist-turned-winemaker take very seriously. “Mother” underpins the texture, balance, and reliability of our wines and is now shared with a small circle of winemaking colleagues.