Kistler

Steve Kistler founded the winery in 1978 with his business partner, the late Mark Bixler, to champion single-clone, single-site wines in California. They built the original winery and planted their first 30 acres in 1979 in the Mayacamas mountains in Sonoma County.

They made their first vintage that year with purchased fruit, with three Chardonnays, three Cabernet Sauvignon bottlings and one lone Pinot Noir, from across Napa and Sonoma. That first winery was a rustic wooden building, above which the Kistler family lived (and sadly burnt down in 2017). It was home to the project, and family, until 1992, when Bixler and Kistler built a new winery in Russian River Valley. Gradually the focus shifted, with Chardonnay the core of the project, complemented by Pinot Noir.

Today, Kistler makes 13 Chardonnays and four Pinot Noirs from 11 single-vineyard sites – a combination of estate-owned sites and long-term leases from the likes of Hudson, Hyde and Dutton. The property works exclusively with heritage clones: the Chardonnays are all made with old Wente, while the Pinot Noirs are made with Calera and Swan clones.

The vineyards are all farmed organically but not certified, with huge attention to detail and low yields to produce small, concentrated berries. The Chardonnays are all whole-cluster pressed in a vertical press, then inoculated with a native yeast for fermentation and maturation in French barrique (35-40% new). The wines spend between 11 and 18 months on lees, with no bâtonnage or racking, and no fining or filtration prior to bottling. The Pinot Noirs spend 14 to 18 months in oak.

The resulting wines are stunning. The Chardonnays are opulent and generous, yet with a flinty minerality and freshness that reins them in – and it’s easy to see why they have become such collector favourites.

In the 1990s, Bixler and Kistler became friends with Bill Price, owner of Durell Vineyard and one of the co-founders of Texas Pacific Group which had interests in various wine businesses including Beringer. He purchased an interest in Kistler in 2008, with Steve Kistler eventually retiring from the project in 2017, to dedicate himself exclusively to his new family project, Occidental. The wines are now made by Jason Kesner, who worked alongside Steve Kistler in the cellar from 2008.

Annual production averages 30,000 cases of wine, with two thirds of that Chardonnay and the rest Pinot Noir. The wines are sold largely direct to consumer, via the property’s mailing list.