Stewardship

Twenty-three acres farmed, a hundred and thirty-seven left wild. How we think about the land.

Hillside sites like ours can look steep and forbidding from the valley floor, but they often hide surprisingly level, welcoming ground. Writing in the St. Helena Star in 1880, a reporter approaching the property from the west described it like this:

"Those who only pass through the center of the Napa Valley have little idea of the vast room for 'ranches' in the mountains on either side. What is apparently a forbidding wall of rocks is really a fertile and pleasant country, well watered with living springs and always rich enough for grapes and other fruit, with usually a little room for grain and hay. One of these little 'pockets' of fertility is found by going in from the east side of the valley..."

Our westernmost vineyards — Los Ricos and the Pool Block — are reached by Taplin Road, which runs east off the Silverado Trail past the Joseph Phelps and Heitz wineries and through tiny Spring Valley, at about 600 feet elevation, within a few hundred yards of the St. Helena and Rutherford appellation boundaries. Our main vineyards, reached by Rutherford Hill Road — The Brothers Vineyard, the Lost Orchard, and the Blending Blocks — sit at 800 to 850 feet, roughly a mile east of St. Helena and Rutherford, a mile and a half north of Pritchard Hill, and two miles south of Howell Mountain.

As with most of the best vineyards in the Napa Valley, ours are pruned, trained, and harvested entirely by hand. A skilled vineyard worker visits each vine a dozen times or more over the course of a season — pruning, thinning shoots and crop, tying, managing the canopy, pulling weeds, and finally, picking.

And like an increasing number of growers across the Napa Valley, we farm holistically, with the health of the woodlands, the vineyards, the workers, and the people who will be consuming our wines in mind. All of our vineyards are certified organic -- among otherthings, this means we don't use herbicides, instead removing weeds by hand or mechanically, and we farm no-till once a vineyard is established.

We call ourselves stewards of the property as a reminder of our responsibility to the woods, the wildlife, and the land itself. Today we farm only 23 of our 160 acres. The rest has a combination of virgin woodland and acreage which was planted in the early years but allowed to regenerate. We believe we've found the right balance: the wine from those 23 acres is what lets us leave the other 137 wild.

We're honored to share the woods with mountain lions, golden eagles, bobcats, and black bears, down to the newts, gopher snakes, and quail living in the Toyon, Monkey Flower, and Bay Laurel below. The woods and the animals living there are the real owners of the Snowden Ranch.