TOPEL WINERY

A homestead becomes a vineyard. Stewards of agrarian heritage and the wild.

On the southern edge of Mendocino County’s Sanel Valley, the estate rises to 1,400 feet — above the river, above the fog. The Topel family found this old sheep farm in the late 1980s and recognised, in its thin shale soils and hand-worked slopes, the conditions Bordeaux varieties ask for.

Of one hundred sixty acres, only fifteen are planted. The rest is left to the oaks, the manzanita, the hawks. Every vine is farmed by hand — no tractors, no machines — and harvested row by row, vine by vine, at the exact right time.