Since the beginning we’ve been farmers first.

Because of the plant material we use, because of the sites we’ve chosen, because of our farming, the fruit can and will reach a perfect balance where it is the only ingredient needed to make exceptional, delicious wines.

Since the mid 1980’s we’ve planted  one heritage clone across all of our Chardonnay vineyards. An unparalleled approach in the new world. Read More

We are California Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

Kistler is a proudly Californian effort. Our goal for nearly fifty years has been to lessen our imprint on every vineyard we work with and the wines that result.   

Old world reverence applied to new world sites.

This is a profoundly difficult process, as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are the varietals most easily marked by heavy-handed farming and the hand of the maker.

Two heritage clones inform all of our Pinot Noir Vineyards. We’ve been propagating these two selections for the last twenty-five years. Read More

We farm seventeen vineyards across five appellations.

Kistler Vineyard, the original planting by Steve Kistler. Bottled since 1986.

From Carneros to Sonoma Valley, to the Russian River Valley and Sonoma Coast, we capture the influence of our sunny, dry summers, the pulses of the Pacific Ocean, and the diverse soils of our region.

Our twelve Single Vineyard Chardonnays, and two Single Vineyard Pinot Noirs transparently express these characteristics.  

Site to site. Year to year.

Intention and patience guide our work.

Energies we directed decades ago inform our work each growing season.

At the end of the day, mother nature is our boss, she is wholly in charge, and she can and will remind you of as much pretty regularly.

Our job is to read, interpret, and navigate the naturally occurring backdrops that we are gifted with each growing season.

An entire year’s work culminates in a single night’s decision.

We harvest our fruit in the cool of the night, stealing every cluster away from the vines under the cover of darkness when the fruit is at its freshest and brightest, and the flavors and acidities are fully intact. The fruit is in a different physiological state at three in the morning than it is at mid-day, very different.

Our barrel rooms are alive.

All of our Chardonnays are fermented in our subterranean barrel chais, where the native yeast and various biological patinas rule the ecology. Hand stacked french cooperage that we purchase as wood and have air dry aged in St. Romain where it is crafted into barrels three years later, houses all of the wines.

A look inside our Chardonnay fermentations.

There’s no leeway for even a single barrel being a quarter inch out of line in our fermentation rooms. They have to be perfectly in line, every one, to set the tone and expectation for every move we make in the cellar.

Each Pinot Noir fermentation is manually watched over, twenty-four hours per day.

We guide our fermentations with as little intervention as possible. Our entire process is designed to enhance the characters of the individual sites, relative to one another, to peel back further layers as opposed to leaving our mark on the wine. Our fermentations are conducted solely with native yeasts, at moderately cool temperatures and with little to no machination of the fruit.

A gentle touch defines our approach to Pinot Noir. We watch, and take notes, and guide more than we overtly act, or intervene. We've worked all year in the vineyard for this fruit. At the winery we simply usher it through its fermentations and into barrel as delicately as we can.

We plant in partnership with our growers instead of buying fruit.

It’s an altogether different type of relationship, rooted in decades of working together, and a unique bond between land and people.

There is a seamlessness, between the acres we farm and those that our growers do.

Rootstock, the foundation of newer plantings that will inform our wines for the next forty years.

Together we select the best soils and propagate the same heritage selections of plant material that we work with in our own vineyards, on our grower’s land with the long-term fully in view.

Connections with our growers go back to our beginnings in the late 1970’s, the youngest of those relationships are over thirty years old at this point.

The best vineyards in California aren’t even planted yet.

They may have vines already in the ground, but it takes generations of working with a site to truly understand its best and highest potential. If there is one thing you have to take from the old world it’s most certainly that.

In our winemaker Jason’s words: “We’ll be tasting at the winery and I’ll ponder aloud how great some of these sites will be in a hundred years. Some of our people will look at me like I’m crazy but isn’t that what we’re doing now, learning things that will be built upon for the making of the wines then?”.

The Backstory

In 1978 Kistler was founded on the notion that compelling wines of site should be made in California.

Steve Kistler and Mark Bixler believed that remarkable and charactered Chardonnays of site could in fact be grown and produced in California. It was a notion ahead of its time. For the last forty years we’ve been pursuing that notion without compromise. Bill Price, longtime owner of Durell Vineyards purchased an interest in Kistler Vineyards from Steve in 2008. Jason Kesner joined Steve in the cellar in 2008 in order to begin to lay the groundwork for the next forty years. Steve retired from Kistler Vineyards at the end of 2017.

Steve & Jason

Jason & Bill

Buck, Jason & Kai

“Steve and I had an eight-year viticultural dialogue before he invited me to join him in the cellar...

Jason Kesner President-Winemaker, Kistler Vineyards

A wine thief passed from Steve to Jason in the fall of 2008.

... we started working together in the spring of 2000 when I began growing the fruit at Hudson Vineyards for the Kistler bottling, among others. After joining Kistler in 2008 our oenological dialogue spanned nearly another decade. All in all a much different pace than is common in the new world. That pace colors a lot of how we do things at Kistler, always have and always will.”

“We just get good grapes…very good grapes” - Mark Bixler