Sonoma: History of Where California Wine Began

Sonoma is where California wine began — and, many argue, where its soul still lives. Larger, more varied, and more rustic than its glamorous neighbour Napa, Sonoma County is a patchwork of family farms and cool coastal valleys that grows everything from world-class Pinot Noir to gnarled old-vine Zinfandel. It was here that the state’s first premium winery was founded, here that the mission grape first took northern root, and here that California’s diversity is written most clearly into the land. This is the history of Sonoma wine.

Where California wine began

Sonoma’s wine story starts with the last of California’s Spanish missions. In 1823, Father José Altimira founded Mission San Francisco Solano at Sonoma — the northernmost and final link in the chain — and planted vineyards of the hardy Mission grape.¹ After Mexican independence and the secularisation of the missions, General Mariano Vallejo, the region’s most powerful figure, expanded these vineyards and made Sonoma a genuine centre of early California winemaking.

This gives Sonoma a fair claim to be the true cradle of the modern California wine industry — the place where European vines first flourished in Northern California, decades before Napa’s rise. The vine and the mission arrived here together, and from this small frontier town the culture of California wine began to spread.

Haraszthy and Buena Vista

Sonoma’s place in history was secured by a visionary immigrant. In 1857, the Hungarian émigré Agoston Haraszthy — later dubbed the “father of California viticulture” — founded Buena Vista in the hills above the town of Sonoma, widely regarded as California’s first premium winery.² He dug deep stone-lined cellars into the hillsides, championed European grape varieties over the workaday Mission grape, and famously imported many thousands of vine cuttings from Europe to prove what California could grow.

Others quickly followed — Gundlach Bundschu was founded in 1858 — and by the late nineteenth century Sonoma was a thriving wine district with a strongly European, and especially Italian, immigrant character.² That farming, immigrant heritage — families working the land rather than grand estates chasing prestige — would shape Sonoma’s identity for good.

The county of a hundred wines

What most distinguishes Sonoma is sheer diversity. The county is far larger than Napa and encompasses a dramatic range of climates — from the fog-bound, near-freezing edge of the Pacific to warm inland valleys — allowing growers to ripen scores of different grape varieties well.³ Where Napa is defined by one great grape, Cabernet, Sonoma is defined by variety itself.

Its structure is different, too. The great majority of Sonoma’s vineyards are family-owned, many of them modest in size, giving the county an agricultural, unpretentious character quite unlike Napa’s polished glamour.³ Sonoma has long worn this difference as a badge of pride: it is wine country as working farmland, a place of orchards and barns and back roads as much as tasting rooms.

A tour of the terroirs

Sonoma is best understood through its patchwork of appellations, each with its own specialty. The cool, fog-swept Russian River Valley (an AVA since 1983) makes some of America’s finest Pinot Noir and Chardonnay; the wild, wind-battered Sonoma Coast pushes cool-climate viticulture to its extreme.⁴ Inland, the warm Alexander Valley produces supple, generous Cabernet Sauvignon, while Dry Creek Valley is famed for its Zinfandel.

To the south, straddling the Napa county line, Carneros catches the cold bay fog and excels at sparkling wine and Pinot Noir. This mosaic — cool coast and warm interior, valley floor and hillside — is why a single county can produce so many different world-class wines, and why Sonoma rewards a lifetime of exploration.

Old vines and Zinfandel heritage

Some of Sonoma’s greatest treasures are its oldest. Scattered through Dry Creek Valley, the Russian River, and beyond are blocks of ancient, gnarled vines — some dating to the 1880s and 1890s — planted by Italian and other immigrant families and often grown as mixed “field blends” of many varieties in a single vineyard.⁵ At their heart is Zinfandel, the grape that became a Californian signature, capable in these old vineyards of extraordinary depth and character.

These heritage vineyards survived where others were pulled out precisely because Sonoma remained a place of small, stubborn family farms. Today they are prized as irreplaceable living history, and a new generation of winemakers treats their old-vine Zinfandel and field blends with the same reverence given to a grand cru — a direct, unbroken link to California’s nineteenth-century wine roots.

The immigrant legacy

More than perhaps any other California region, Sonoma was built by immigrant hands. Italian families above all put down deep roots here: the vast Italian Swiss Colony, founded at Asti in 1881, grew into one of the largest wine producers in the state, while in the Russian River the Bohemian Korbel brothers established their sparkling-wine house in 1882.² These were communities for whom wine was simply part of daily life, not a luxury trade.

That character helped Sonoma survive its darkest years. Through Prohibition, small family growers kept their vineyards alive by selling grapes to home winemakers and making wine for sacramental use, and it is largely thanks to their stubbornness that so many of Sonoma’s irreplaceable old vines still stand today.⁵ The county’s modern diversity and its old-vine heritage are, in a real sense, a gift from those immigrant farming families.

Sonoma today

Sonoma’s modern quality revolution has deep roots — as far back as 1953, the pioneering Hanzell Vineyards was already making benchmark Pinot Noir and Chardonnay by European methods — but it has accelerated dramatically in recent decades.⁶ Today Sonoma is recognised as one of the most exciting and diverse wine regions in the world, its cool-climate Pinots and Chardonnays and its old-vine Zinfandels admired everywhere.

Yet it has kept its character. Sonoma remains, at heart, a county of farmers — larger, wilder, and more down-to-earth than its famous neighbour, and proud of it. If Napa is California’s showcase, Sonoma is its heartland: the place where the state’s wine story began, and where its extraordinary diversity is most fully alive.

Keep exploring American wine

• Napa Valley — Sonoma’s glamorous neighbour just over the Mayacamas range.
• California — the wider story of the state Sonoma helped begin.
• American Wine: The Complete History — the national story Sonoma opens.

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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American Wine

Jancis Robinson & Linda Murphy

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References & further reading

1. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 1 (University of California Press, 1989), on the California missions and Mission San Francisco Solano (1823); mission and Vallejo records. ↩
2. Charles L. Sullivan, A Companion to California Wine (University of California Press, 1998), s.v. “Haraszthy,” “Buena Vista,” and “Sonoma.” ↩
3. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Sonoma” and its AVAs. ↩
4. U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), AVA regulations, including the Russian River Valley AVA (1983); Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson, The World Atlas of Wine, 8th ed. (2019). ↩
5. Historic Vineyard Society records and Charles L. Sullivan, Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and Its Wine (University of California Press, 2003), on Sonoma’s old-vine and field-blend heritage. ↩
6. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 2 (UC Press, 2005), on Hanzell Vineyards and the modern Sonoma revival. ↩