Sonoma County, California
Sonoma is California's other great wine county — right next door to Napa, often overshadowed by it, but with a longer history, more land under vine, and arguably more genuine diversity packed into one place. If Napa is the polished, glossy version of California wine, Sonoma has always felt more like its rustic, working cousin.
The earliest plantings here came from an unlikely source. Russian fur trappers planted the first known vines in Sonoma in 1812 at an outpost called Fort Ross, established mainly to support otter pelt hunting for the Alaskan fur trade — wine was almost a side project. A decade later, in 1823, Franciscan missionary José Altamira planted vines at the Sonoma Mission, and those cuttings went on to seed plantings across much of Northern California.
The real character-driven founding story belongs to one extraordinary, slightly reckless man. Agoston Haraszthy, a Hungarian immigrant who called himself the "Count of Buena Vista," founded Buena Vista Winery in 1857 — credited with building California's first gravity-flow winery, excavating its first wine caves, and pioneering the use of California redwood for wine barrels. In 1861 he was commissioned by California's governor to study European viticulture, and returned with over 100,000 vine cuttings spanning more than 350 varieties — a genuinely massive bet on what California wine could become, even if his own finances unraveled not long after. By 1920, Sonoma had overtaken Los Angeles as the state's top wine region, with 256 wineries and 22,000 planted acres — then Prohibition cut that down to fewer than 50 wineries almost overnight
The modern renaissance, like so much of California wine, took root in the 1960s and 70s, and Sonoma had a quiet hand in one of the industry's defining moments: roughly half the grapes in the Chateau Montelena Chardonnay that stunned the wine world at the 1976 Judgment of Paris came from Sonoma's Bacigalupi Vineyard, even though Napa got most of the credit. Sonoma County was declared its own AVA in 1981, and it now contains over 18 nested AVAs spanning wildly different terrain — from sea level along the fog-swept coast to over 2,200 feet up the Mayacamas and Sonoma Mountains.
That range is really Sonoma's whole identity. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay dominate the cooler, fog-influenced areas like Russian River Valley and Green Valley, producing wines with finesse and bright acidity, while warmer inland valleys like Dry Creek and Alexander Valley turn out rich, structured Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Syrah. Sonoma Valley itself still holds genuinely old-vine Zinfandel planted well over a century ago, often as a jumbled "field blend" of other rare varieties — exactly the kind of heritage plantings that don't exist anywhere near as much in Napa.
That mix of serious old-vine heritage, family-run wineries (Dry Creek Valley in particular is still dominated by descendants of the original 19th-century immigrant farmers), and genuine stylistic range across one county is what makes Sonoma such a natural fit for BoundbyWine. It's California wine without quite as much polish or price tag, often from people who've been farming the same hillside for generations.
In this collection you'll find Sonoma's full range — cool-climate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from the coast and Russian River Valley, alongside bold, old-vine Zinfandel and structured Cabernet from the warmer inland valleys
