Sonoma County

Sonoma County is not Napa with a different marketing department. It is a larger, climatically split county: Pacific shoreline, river valleys, and warmer interiors. Sonoma County Vintners describe 19 AVAs and more than 60 grape varieties, with the Russian River and roughly 60 miles of coast as cooling — fog drawn into interior valleys, warm days, cold nights ¹. Those are grower-association climate claims, useful as a map of why the same grape can taste different twenty miles apart. An AVA is still only a TTB geography on a label ². This page will not inventory the nineteen.

Dairy sits in the same county. Cowgirl Creamery’s public home is now Sonoma County cheesemaking ³. Point Reyes Farmstead’s second creamery is in Petaluma ⁴. Marin County is the coastal dairy next door.

For wine craft see Wine and Grape. For fermentation science, Fermentation. For the neighboring valley appellation, Napa Valley. No winery reviews, no hours.