Geyser Peak Winery

One of California’s oldest and most renowned wineries, Geyser Peak Winery was founded in 1880 by Augustus Quitzow, a pioneer in Alexander Valley winemaking, Geyser Peak has flourished as an award-winning winery for more than 130 years. Quitzow chose the original winery site in Geyserville for its vantage point of the famed Geysers Geothermal area. The white steam that billowed from the geysers along the mountain slopes provided the winery with a spectacular ‘view of the clouds’.

Today, Geyser Peak pays fond tribute to its past roots in Alexander Valley as it sets forth on a new path into the Dry Creek Valley Appellation where the winery has recently relocated. Although the address is new, the commitment to the highest quality artisan winemaking is not. Geyser Peak will continue to “Reach For Peak” for many years to come.

We believe the highest quality fruit yields the highest quality wines. To this end we source our fruit from many vineyard sites across Sonoma County and throughout northern California to showcase each terroir’s unique flavor profile and influence on varietal expression.

Russian River Valley. Located about fifteen minutes south of our winery, this region features a cool climate that is ideally suited to producing the intense, fruit-forward and vibrant style of Sauvignon Blanc that is Geyser Peak Winery’s hallmark. The Russian River AVA has earned worldwide acclaim for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir as well. With this appellation’s proximity to the ocean, the cool, morning fog blankets the vines in the early morning and late afternoon, ensuring that grapes ripen slowly and steadily.

Alexander Valley. Our winery home in the Alexander Valley offers one of the most diverse wine growing environments in California. On the valley floor, along the banks of the Russian River, you’ll find rich alluvial soils, some with sandy clay loam and scattered with gravel. As you move up off the valley floor to the benchlands and hillsides, you’ll discover an astonishingly diverse array of soils arising from decomposed volcanic rocks, including granite and even marine uplift.

We believe wine should enhance everyday moments. Our ambition is to produce wines that are accessible and appreciable to both connoisseur and novice. In striving to make the best wines possible, we craft wines that reflect their point of origin, we embrace the freedom to combine traditional Old World methods with New World innovations. We constantly research and seek out new techniques and wine making processes to test, evaluate, and elevate our winemaking to craft beautiful wines from the Sonoma County and other premium wine growing regions throughout California.

Blending is the winemaker’s art and the technique by which we put a signature on the style of our wines. Our blending takes place in multiple stages throughout the cellar life of a wine to best enhance the subtlety and nuance of a particular wine. Some wines, such as our Meritage, are designed as blends of multiple varietals. Other wines, such as our Walking Tree Cabernet Sauvignon, start with a foundation of a single varietal with a small component of another varietal blended for intrigue. Balance, harmony, and complexity occur as a result of combining grape varieties, various vineyard sources, or different vineyard blocks into one final, finished wine.

We have the enviable luxury of sourcing many small parcels of top quality fruit, optimizing each and every lot. We achieve this through small lot vinification – keeping wines from each vineyard separate during the winemaking process. This not only enables us to better evaluate each vineyard site and adjust growing techniques from vintage to vintage, it also provides us a ‘spice rack’ from which to select blending components. Countless ‘bench trials’ are conducted in our blending room before blends are assembled in the cellar. This process ensures that no two vintages are ever exactly alike.

Winemaker Ondine Chattan has just completed her 15th harvest with Geyser Peak Winery. Under her leadership, the winemaking team has honed and refined the now distinctive style of our wines, introducing innovative production techniques, and enthusiastically promoting the Alexander Valley and our broad portfolio of award-winning wines. A native of Marin County, Ondine spent a great deal of time in Sonoma Wine Country during her childhood, where she fell in love with the wine industry at an early age. This passion in her soul has never wavered and grew even stronger while obtaining an undergraduate degree in Viticulture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a Master’s Degree in Enology from Fresno State University .

After college, her love of Zinfandel and Rhone varietals led her to positions at Cline Cellars in Sonoma Valley and Ridge Vineyards in Cupertino before settling down to her ‘winemaking home’ in the Alexander Valley. Joining Geyser Peak was a dream come true for Ondine, with its diversity of varietals, vineyards and wine styles inspiring her creativity and fueling her passion for producing exciting, accessible, unique wines. Ondine resides in Healdsburg with her husband David and three young sons.