Healdsburg, Dry Creek and Alexander Valley

Solid · Geyserville

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Dino Bugica cures prosciutto, salumi, sausage and lardo on the property, and the board of it costs $30. There are pig skulls in the back garden.

Solid · Healdsburg

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Kathleen Stewart opened this on the Healdsburg plaza in 1987 with Lindsey Shere, Chez Panisse's pastry chef. The sticky bun is $4.50 and there is a line out the door at weekends.

Solid · Californian · Healdsburg · $$$

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Erik Anderson stuffs the burger patty with Gruyere and the Bordelaise goes over it at the table. Barndiva dropped its tasting menu in January 2024 and moved into the gallery next door.

Solid · Healdsburg

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The 2016 Gopher Hills Block Pinot Noir took a perfect 100 at the 2018 North Coast Wine Challenge, the first perfect score the contest had given in six years.

Solid · Healdsburg

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Nalle's Zinfandels stop at 14 percent. The vines by the parking lot went in the ground in 1927, and the winery sits under six feet of soil and three hundred rosemary bushes.

Solid · Geyserville

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Ten thousand of their fifteen thousand cases of Zinfandel are Mother Clone, blended with fruit off Home Ranch vines more than a hundred years old, and the winemaker's job on it is to change nothing.

Solid · Healdsburg

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George Davis planted this hillside in 12-foot rows in the 1970s, and his son Alex doubled the density by planting between the vines instead of pulling them.

Solid · Healdsburg

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Lou and Susan Preston farm 125 acres of Dry Creek Valley and sell the vegetables next to the wine.

Solid · Healdsburg

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Judy Jordan left her father's winery at twenty-five to make sparkling wine here in 1986. Nicole Hitchcock has made it since 2015, and Wine Enthusiast named her Winemaker of the Year in 2022.

Solid · Healdsburg

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Michelle Wood makes the dumplings by hand off her family's recipes, in a Highway 128 general store that has stood there since 1893.

Solid · Healdsburg

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In 2022 this became the first Sonoma County winery certified Regenerative Organic.

Solid · Healdsburg

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The seated tasting runs $35: five single-vineyard wines, about seventy-five minutes, six people at most.

Solid · Healdsburg

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The Mauritsons pushed Rockpile into becoming its own AVA in 2002 and have farmed Dry Creek Valley since 1868. Julie Albin's pick off the range is the Jack's Cabin Zinfandel.

Listed · Spanish, tapas · Healdsburg · $$

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Mark and Terri Stark toured Spain and came home with a tapas bar for Healdsburg, open since 2012. Jamón Ibérico and paella come out to a back garden that holds most of the room.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Charlie Palmer put Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon on the menu at $25 and deglazes it with beef stock instead of red wine. He cooked next to her on PBS.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Charles Bacigalupi was a Healdsburg dentist who planted Chardonnay on Westside Road in the early 1960s, using budwood from Karl Wente.

Listed · Healdsburg

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This green-and-white clapboard store has stood at the Dry Creek crossroads since 1881 and was a speakeasy through Prohibition.

Listed · Healdsburg

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The vineyards are on the far Sonoma Coast, at Camp Meeting Ridge and Sea View Ridge, and the tasting is in a Healdsburg garden an hour inland. Three wines and a snack board is $75.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Thirty-five dollars buys five current releases and nobody stands over you. You take a glass into the garden and come back to the bar when you want the next one.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Zinfandel and Italian heritage varieties, poured on a lawn in downtown Healdsburg with a bocce court on it.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Dry Creek Valley has a Mediterranean climate, so George and Mick Unti planted Italian and Rhone varieties into it. Sixty acres, organic, all theirs.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Zinfandel off Dry Creek Road since 1993, made inside a century-old tin barn that Ken and Diane Wilson restored. The tasting is on the deck.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Four generations on West Dry Creek Road since the early 1900s, still family owned, still small on purpose. Twenty-five dollars, by appointment, six people maximum, booked by telephone.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Molotes, tasajo and chapulines on a Healdsburg menu, ten to nine daily with a patio. Those are Oaxacan dishes and they are not standard around here.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Cyrus Alexander's homestead, in the valley named after him, with a 48,000-square-foot cave underneath. Twenty dollars for four estate wines at the bar.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Rick Hutchinson makes the wine and owns the place, and his line is that wines and people who are too extreme are begging to be misunderstood. Twenty-five dollars, walk-ins welcome.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Over seventy percent of the fruit comes off Bella's own century-old vines, and you taste it underground in the caves. Thirty-five dollars seated, capped at eight people.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Fractured sandstone on the West Sonoma Coast against shale in the Santa Cruz Mountains, tasted side by side in a working winery in downtown Healdsburg.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Thirteen hundred acres, three hundred of them planted, and the rest left alone. The signature visit is a two-hour Hummer tour across it, $120 to $150.

Listed · Healdsburg

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The first vines went in on Limerick Lane in 1972 and still make the Reserve Petite Sirah and Reserve Syrah. Sixty dollars gets you the Pinot straight out of the barrel.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Five single-vineyard wines for $65, or four for $25, on a terrace over the Russian River Valley. Walk-ins get a seat if there is one.

Listed · Healdsburg

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The winery names its Fume Blanc and its Dry Chenin Blanc before its Zinfandels, which in the Dry Creek Valley in 2026 is a choice somebody made on purpose.

Listed · Geyserville

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Dogs come into the tasting room, onto the patio and onto the lawn, and Lady the Labrador is usually on the door.

Listed · Cloverdale

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Silver Oak buys his Cabernet and Passalacqua takes his hillside Zinfandel.

Listed · Healdsburg

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More than thirty Chardonnay vineyards and fifteen Pinot Noir sites go through 130-odd small fermentations here every vintage, the Pinot in one-ton bins.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Ben Papapietro and Bruce Perry started with a garage, old equipment and friends, and now make single-vineyard Pinot Noir and Zinfandel.

Listed · Geyserville

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Five estate vineyards the family farms itself, in Alexander Valley for four decades. Henry Trione started it and his granddaughter is running it now.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Tastings on Westside Road are for members of The List and nobody else. Six people maximum, no dogs, no outside food, and $75 a head if you cancel inside a day.

Temp closed · Geyserville

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The tasting room at the top of Dry Creek Road has been shut since August 2024, and the winery still says so on its own front page. The wine still sells online.

Listed · Healdsburg

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Field blends: mixed plantings picked and co-fermented together, blended from the day they come off the vine. Bill and Betsy Nachbaur founded it in 1990 and sold the brand in 2023.

Listed · Healdsburg

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The F. Teldeschi domain now calls the business Red Owl Vineyards & F. Teldeschi Winery. That name is the only concrete thing on the whole site.

Listed · Healdsburg

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A Healdsburg Avenue winery with no hours, no tasting fee and no visiting terms published anywhere. Call before you build an afternoon around it.

Listed · Healdsburg

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A Stonestreet tasting room on Healdsburg Avenue, with no fee, no hours and no tasting terms published anywhere. Call before you plan around it.

Listed · Healdsburg

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An Alexander Valley winery on West Soda Rock Lane, with no hours, no fee and no visiting terms published anywhere. Call before you drive out.

Listed · Healdsburg

402 Moore Ln. Details to come.